Gaming Audience Shifts

http://arstechnica.com/journals/thumbs.ars/2007/2/12/7015

This ars techinica article refers to the numbers of games bought in 2006 and what it reveals about who are playing video games now. The genres that were most commonly purchased were sports games and license games (games developed with Disney titles, etc.) illustrating that a wider variety of people are playing video games and that the market is making tons of money off games sold to people who are not as interested in the high-tech hard-core games. The concern of the author of the article is that the games that hard-core gamers play tend to cost much more money to manufacture than the games that topped the best-seller list, therefore the hard core games may lose their place in the market. It makes me wonder why video games are produced and if some are designed as representative of the potential of video games to serve as an art form, as prototypes or groundbreaking technology, or if they are simply designed to sell copies.

The compromise would be something like Zelda Twilight Princess, designed with beautiful graphics and serving as a fulfillment of Miyamoto's ideal of the stoic hero while remaining wildly popular with hard-core gamers as well as casual users. It seems that there are many more games however that simply focus on selling copies, like Madden, where graphics hardly change, where game play is the same, and where the only reason to develop a second or third Madden game would be to sell to those who had not bought a previous copy or who like sports games and do not really purchase games as a "connoisseur". If these games were to become the only available because they sold the most, I expect that video game development would slow and that console hardware technology would also plummet as games would not require faster and larger memories. However, these games and the new Wii console illustrate the growing popularity of video games and the new heights the technology could reach. Plus, there will probably always be a market for hard-core gamers considering that they would demand or create their own high tech games.

So I understand the author's concern, yet I think that these lists demonstrate a more positive future for video gaming considering that more people are buying games and consoles who are not hard-core gamers and that they could potentially appreciate the games and technology as art forms or even legitimate representatives of society.