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Perturabo -> RE: The Good Health of the Wargaming Niche (4/26/2013 6:55:01 AM)
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ORIGINAL: wodin
Perturabo..well turn based is big business again...go check the graphics on many indie games..infact they try and be 8bit and sell in the bucketload..things have changed from even three years ago.
Indie hipster games. Nothing has changed. Their 8-bit is worthless, because they aren't making mechanically sophisticated games and can't match the mastery of special effects of the old devs.
Today's 8-bit = lazy cash in.
The return of isometric cRPGs - nothing to do with the future sophisticated cRPGs that were heralded by GURPS: Fallout and Jagged Alliance 2. Instead of that we get Shadowrun Returns that doesn't even have ammo and inventory, two story-based cRPGs with MMO-style combat and Fallout: Tactics 2.
If you want to see how stuff that is as hardcore as wargames fares look at Thorvalla and Grimoire.
quote:
ORIGINAL: Tomn
Let’s assume that just one percent, a teeny, tiny one percent of everyone on Steam checks out a niche product, like a wargame, and finds it interesting. That’s 40,000 customers right there and then, and while wargaming may be niche, I truly and sincerely doubt that it makes up no more than 1% of the gaming population. Even if we remain conservative and kick it up to 5%, that’s 200,000 customers. Sure, you couldn’t compare such numbers to big names like Call of Duty or Assassin’s Creed, but it’s still quite enough to make a comfortable living for a niche developer.
That is, I should think, an incredibly different beast entirely from advertising in monthly or weekly gaming magazines back in the ‘90s, back when gaming itself was still a fairly small industry and still suffered from the stigmata of being for the “immature,” and where not everybody who played games subscribed to magazines or checked out everything on them.
No. The history of gaming is a history of decline caused by watering down of the audience - of computers becoming more and more common and thus ending up in hands of less and less intelligent people. Wargaming is for intelligent people and intelligent people like to be informed. That's why they were reading game magazines. Because picking up random expensive game in a store isn't something that an intelligent person does.
Wargamers are usually also passionate about history. Most of people are very stupid. History lessons quickly make their stupidity apparent to them so they don't like history.
"Stigmatas" and popularity or lack of it don't have influence on wargaming audience because the audience is accustomed to doing stuff that is unpopular among majority of people and not doing stuff that is popular.
If someone didn't read gaming magazines because gaming was "immature", it is almost certain that he was handed out a faulty brain just like some 90% of human population and thus is condemned to playing Call of Duty and the likes.
But returning to the part of humanity that wasn't handed out a faulty brain, a large part of that population won't be interested in wargames just because, similarly as one for example may have abilities to be very good at a math but simply find them not interesting enough to spend ones time on them. So, there's 5 percent of gamers capable of grasping complex wargames but sadly, most of them will be much more interested in stuff like Project Eternity, Torment 2 and Wasteland 2. (1% of gamers is a wildly optimistic assumption. But still there may be some who don't know that they prefer wargames. Though I have spent quite a lot of time trying to promote wargames among the 5% and almost all of them prefer cRPGs, RTS and similar game genres).
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