What is the biggest thing holding videogames back from reaching a truly mass market audience? Some might claim a number of factors as the main reason why the audience for videogames is still teenage to adult white males, but the biggest reason I see is the price of games.
While you could say that a large part of the problem is the herd mentality that developers and publishers show when developing games. I know I am not the only one who has watched the 'it' titles move from genre to genre. A while ago it was platformers that you could not escape, now its first person shooters. Still, I think that would be only a good answer, not the best answer.
You would probably scream that the problem is used games hurting the profits of devlopers as a reason that there is not more of an outreach to other audiences. But using that logic you would have to explain why everything else that gets sold used is different... cars, furniture, CDs, DVDs- all of these are available used, yet you don't see a major outcry about those used markets. Those industries also manage to attract a wider audience than videogames do.
I have heard some say that it is different with games, because they are made by artists who deserve to get paid for their work... but the record and movie companies sure do seem much more concerned with piracy than the used market, and I am pretty sure painters don't see a dime when a painting they sold gets re-sold!
Maybe it is the console war, where companies have to spend their money re-developing games for many different consoles. You may claim this does nothing but drive up development costs the cost of games for the consumer at the same time.
I would say you are warmer, but that your answer was only partly correct.
My answer for what is holding games back from being the #1 form of entertainment in the world for all genders and ethnicites is simply the cost of games for the consumer, and how this prevents games from being an impulse item purchase like most of the popular forms of entertainment are.
An impulse item is a cheap to purchase product that sell at the last minute because of their relative lot cost. Often they are thrown into a purchase without a second thought. They are also often placed close to the register in stores (think about the candy lane that every grocery store has at nearly every register.)
Most stores that sell entertainment like DVDs or CDs have an impulse section near the check out. Most of the time this selection is a mixture of inexpensive but quality older movies, the newest of the new movies, and the crappiest and cheapest movies available in the store.
A recent trip to my local Best Buy got me excited when I noticed, right next to the impulse rack for the movie Twilight, a videogame impulse section... I quickly became depressed when I saw just how bad the selection of this section was.
Sure, there were some great games to choose from if you wanted a game from the PS2 Greatest Hits line, but if you were looking for something for the newer systems then you were 100% out of luck unless you wanted something craptastic like Anubis II from Zoo (1).
After this trip to Best Buy I decided to look around and compare the sales of DVDs to videogames.
Since the games were next to Twilight I decided to start with that DVD... I looked up DVD sales at the-numbers.com (2), and found out that in just three weeks on shelves it had already sold 7,086,697 units. Author Stephenie Meyer even managed to squeeze 15 million copies sold of her five books in the Twilight series last year alone ( 3).
Those are pretty impressive numbers, but I figured that sales of huge games like Wii Fit or Halo 3 had to eclipse those numbers… right?
Wrong!
Wii Fit has been out for almost a year now, but as of February had sold only 6 million copies. Halo 3, which has been out since 2007 has only moved 5.9 million units(4).
Now, I know I am a bit crazy to balk at a number like 6 million. I would take 6 million in sales for anything I produced in a heartbeat. Hell, I would even take as low as a number of six clicks on this article and still think I had been successful!
What surprises me about these numbers is that I think either of these games deserves better sales than any version- be it DVD or novel- of Twilight.
And yes, I do know that there are a number of factors that limit the sales of games. Things like used sales and the fact that there are fewer game systems out there than there are DVD players are two huge problems for videogame publishers, but they are also problems that could be rather easily fixed... if more people could afford them.
I think both of those issues could be solved if videogames were lowered in price enough to be impulse items. I have to wonder what a game like Fable 2 could sell if it could be bought by someone who did not yet own a console, but could buy a copy for $20 and a console for $100.
Publishers probably claim that they are simply offering games at a price that will let them recoup their costs for developing and publishing based on the sales they expect… and that is another huge part of this problem.
Videogame prices at launch are designed to exploit a small core, but voracious, audience. Activision knows that they will get way more sales for a game like Call of Duty 15 than they ever would for a new IP. Even though publishers know that some games will sell in the millions, they still offer them at a price designed to recoup their expenses for the rest of their catalog from this core gamer demographic. And if you wonder why you only get $15 for trading in a game you paid $60 for- well, its because there is a good chance the game you sold will go down to $30 new, and Gamestop is out to make a profit... If you wanted more for your trade in you would take the time to use one of the more profitable forms of trading. But we are Americans, and we are all too lazy to put in any actual effort!
Now, I am not one of those crazy people that think that companies should not be out to make a profit… as a matter of fact I have a way that publishers could make much, much more money from the games they develop.
STOP LETTING VIDEOGAME CONSOLE DEVELOPERS MAKE CONSOLES THAT ARE NOT BACKWARDS COMPATIBLE!
Now, in the early years of videogame consoles I can see what offering backwards compatibility was a problem. Companies like Sega, Sony and Nintendo were dealing with a constantly rising ceiling for what was possible, and this lead to a number of different formats being used.
Sure, there will be further developments in the future. We might go the digital download path, or we may find some alternative to DVDs that can hold all your games on one disk… who knows what is possible?
The problem is not what is possible; the problem is how quick videogame companies are to move away from what is present and to what has become possible. A large part of this is also driven by the 5 year cycle that console makers have become so locked into. While constant improving technology made this much more necesary in the past, we have reached a point where we can kind of sit back and take a little bit more of a breather... I hope that Sony manages to pull off it the 10 year life cycle they claim the PS3 will have, but something tells me we will see some type of PS4 sometime in the next 2 to 3 years.
Things seemed to change on the backwards compatibility front when Sony announced that the PS3 was going to be backwards compatible just like the PS2 was. I thought at the time that we would finally see what type of sales were possible in the long term if a game could be sold new still for up to 8 years after its release.
It is just too bad, then, that Sony ended up with the difficulties they have with the PS3. Because of those difficulties Sony ended up stripping the backwards compatibility out of the PS3, and my hopes that games could be more like books, movies, and music were dashed.
Videogames are stuck in a cycle where they have to make their profit within the first few months of release. There are few to no games that can still end up making a profit if they are not hits as soon as they come out, or at the most very soon after. Simply put- there is no real Dark Side of the Moon in videogames.
When a band releases a new CD, the trend is that new sales of their older albums rise as well. This is not really possible for games, because by the time a developers new game has come out, their publisher has moved on to whatever genre they are flooding the market with at that time and older titles are already way off the business plan- relegated to the status of success they obtained in their first few months of sale.
This leads to a situation where there can be almost no cult hits in videogames… just cult culture around great games that were not discovered by the masses when they first came out. The worst part about this is that there is almost no chance that the development houses of these cult games will still be around to see the cult their games garnered by their new games, because they have been shuttered due to poor sales of their last game.
There are a few games that have broken this trend. Tetris has come out for almost every system that can play a game… Peggle is quietly mirroring this success as well. Nintendo is really bucking this trend with games like Mario Kart- too bad their system is so flooded by shovelware that it is a bit hard to notice the many great things the Wii has done for videogames.
The true success of Twilight in all forms, movie and book, is that they are destined to be sold for years to come. They will be remembered possibly forever, while great games like Bioshock, Uncharted, Mad World, Professor Layton, and Mirror’s Edge will probably be hard to find new even a year or two from today.
The used videogame market is a huge problem for videogame publishers because they allow it to be. Offering games at $60, and not having a plan for the products they create that is even half the time they spent developing their products is not only ludicrous and short sighted- it is also the whole reason while a million units sold is the benchmark of a successful game instead of 5 or 10 million. Sure, games do go down in price after a while in the market, but by the time they are affordable to people who have waited for the price to go down, these consumers have already probably either bought a used copy, or just moved on to a different game.
Videogames are still considered a relatively niche activity because they are created by people who have a niche mindset. Just like publishers strive to be as innovative as possible when they create games, they should also try to innovate a little in the way they sell games.
Getting the price down on games could lead to a new world for all game players. While many are quick to poo-poo Nintendo for trying to reach out to a broader market, we must all remember that the more people are out there playing games, the more games we will see being made. Developers and Publishers might scream that reducing the price on games would hurt their bottom line, but I have to think that it would only hurt the bottom line of games that were developed for too much money and that ended up steaming piles that everyone ignored.
Rant over!
Sites discussed in this article-
2- http://www.the-numbers.com/dvd/charts/weekly/thisweek.php )
3- http://www.thebookseller.com/news/74170-meyer-top-as-hachette-dominates-us.html
4- http://kotaku.com/5177033/wii-fit-officially-topples-halo-3-in-sales
