"Broadening our audience"

[Rich Webb]

I was going to ask this on another thread but it would have been far too much of a tangent and it deserves its own separate discussion.

In the 'Biggest jokes in Gaming' thread, someone mentioned the way that publishers seem to use the phrase - "Broadening our audience" as a metaphor for "Watering down our product for the casuals".

Now, although I do agree that this does appear to be the case, I thought I'd say a thing or two about the positives of this approach and get some stories and examples from you lovely folk.

On many occasions, I have become interested in new bands by listening to one of their more 'accessible' albums. If I really like what they do, I will dig deep into the back catalogue and really grow to love the quirks of the material. In fact, it's the very quirkiest and oddest segments of said material that becomes the quintessential flavour of that particular artist's voice.

Some potent personal examples of this are the Chili Peppers (and John Frusciante's solo albums), Pink Floyd, Electric Light Orchestra and particularly Incubus. I also noticed this pattern regarding my love of 'Studio Ghibli" films.

So not only did it apply to music and movies but games too. I found a really great passion for a gaming franchise when I discovered it quite late, looked at older versions of the game on previous consoles/generations and still found the earlier games fully engaging. I was introduced to Zelda, as I'm sure many fans were, by the 'Ocarina of Time'. After I finished it, I bought all the other previous (and following) Zelda games I could get my hands on and loved them.

So this got me thinking. Perhaps there are two ways you could orientate the phrase "broadening our audience". Is it:

1: Making the amount of people who will buy this product more broad?

or

2: Making the tastes of the people who will buy the product anyway more broad?

From a cynical perspective, option 1 is almost certainly what somebody who is interested in sales is going to mean. That said, once I bought 'Princess Mononoke', I then spent another ten times as much buying every studio Ghibli DVD I could get my hands on.

Perhaps they are pretty much the same thing but my point is, I actually quite enjoy being a little broadened. How about you?

 

[KarmaTheAlligator]

The only problem is that when it comes to games, we don't have a choice on which meaning we get. From a company's point of view, it will always mean getting more people on board and therefore get more money. From a customer's point of view, the second meaning is in no way guaranteed to apply, and can in fact have the opposite effect because there are too many factors to take into consideration (as an example, take the Final Fantasy series: Squeenix has been messing around with the formula in every game, trying plenty of things with various degrees of success. Result? Some games are nearly universally despised). In the end, people use the one meaning that everyone can agree on.

And I also enjoy discovering new things, it's just that when I like something and it gets changed to something that I don't enjoy for the purpose of broadening the audience, I get quite understandably annoyed.

 

[Rich Webb]

I agree it can be very frustrating. As far as I'm concerned, skyward sword didn't happen.

 

[ERaptor]

Eh, i dont know. "Braodening the audience" is something i really dont want to hear most of the time, while i agree that there are certain cases where it works, there are also a lot of cases where Developers change exactly those things that made the game appealing in the first place. To give an example, I still heavily oppose the horde of people demanding that Dark Souls should get easier (this isnt _that_ relevant anymore, since DS2 made it very clear that the series is not aimed at casuals). One of the things that got the Game its fanbase is the difficulty, it means something to complete certain parts and bosses of the game. It felt great to boast to mates how you finally solo'd Ornie and Smough after 3 tries, or how you finally got trough a particularly nasty area. When it was announced that DS2 should appeal to more people, I feared that it would be made far easier and thus boring. However, thankfully it was revealed that some of the more clunky parts of Dark Souls were getting ironed out, but the general feel of the game would stay the same.

Thats a kind of "Getting more people into this" i can wholeheartedtly agree with. But sadly theres a lot of Series out there who get gradually dumbed down, mechanics and features vanish to make it simpler. Look at the new Sim City, or the Dawn of War Series. Sim City Maps today are really small, and transport management is laughable. Dawn of War on the other hand had great RTS Gameplay, with strategic base building, caputrable points and resource management. Dawn of War 2 removed the base-building entirely to "focus more on the action". The Plan to get more people to play by making it more action-oriented backfired horribly. Today the Lobbys Online seem empty and deserted compared to earlier stages.

What im trying to say is, dont try to fix what isnt broken, just because you want to milk extra dollars.

 

[A-D.]

The phrase "broadening the audience" or "broadening to appeal to a wider audience" rather is simply PR Talk that can be translated thusly: We'd like more people to buy more of our game, therefore we are going to make and market it based on the lowest common denominator.

In short, the idea is to appeal to as many people as at all possible, which in itself implies the publisher or developer going "fuck the fanbase, we need a bigger one". They do essentially not care about who got them as far as they did, but rather they care about who would get them even further, as such the old fanbase is thrown under the bus if there is even a small chance that the next game will get a bigger audience instead.

In fact many developers are guilty of this at the end of the day, look at DA2 for example, or ME2. While their prequels of both series were good and loved by some fans, they figured that DA: Origins did not get them enough of a fanbase (customers), hence they tried to broaden the appeal to rope in people who were not already a fan, whilst trying to not alienate the original fanbase they already had. The same was true with Mass Effect 2, the first one had some problems that kept it from being universally regarded well, the inventory being one prime example. So they "streamlined" the experience, which is essentially "cut out the fat", which however caused other features to be implemented like the thermal clip and the entire loss of meaningful weapon customization, plus the lack of party management in both DA2 and ME2.

Which in turn some of the original fanbase didnt like, again its only a problem if they fail to get a bigger audience out of this gamble. They are perfectly willing to sacrifice part of their customerbase, or fanbase, as long as they win at the end, i.e. get more customers than they had before. And those examples can be found with nearly every developer and publisher these days. there are only a few left who stick to what is essentially their core fanbase.

 

[MysticSlayer]

It's hard not to be cynical of the phrase when you've had a franchise you loved become something you don't love at all because the developers were "broadening the audience". This becomes especially annoying in cases such as DICE with Battlefield where they often resorted to criticizing older fans for not liking the new route the franchise was taking. After experiences like that, you can't simply claim that you are "broadening appeal" and not expect older fans to become very cynical of the new product, if not downright hostile to it. Yes, there are times where it works, and Firaxis has often shown that you can streamline and broaden appeal without sacrificing too much of what made the older games good, and in some cases, such as Civ5, you could argue that the newer product is better for it. Still, even in those situations, it is hard to forget what so many other companies have done in the name of "broadening appeal".

However, I think with time, most gamers can eventually figure out when a company is "broadening appeal" because they actually prefer the new game and want the fans to enjoy the experience as well, and we can also tell when a company is simply doing it because they hope to increase the size of their wallet in proportion to the increasing size of the fan base. Trust also has a lot to do with it. For instance, you can't have EA publish your game and expect "broader appeal" comments to not be received with the most extreme of cynicism, but other publishers like 2K might be able to get by with only minimal cynicism thrown their way. This comes regardless of whether or not the company's ultimate goal is just to make money, but trust can also only go so far before it breaks.

 

[RJ 17]

The thing is that in the gaming industry, the term "Broadening the Audience" doesn't necessarily equate to "making the game more accessible". It can, in some cases, but more often than not it doesn't. In the gaming world, "broadening the audience" often means shifting the game's genre entirely.

Case in point: look at Dead Space 3 and Resident Evil 6.

Dead Space 3 was one of those games where they came out and said "We want to broaden the audience for this game" and they turned it from any attempt at being survival/horror into just flat-out 3rd person action/shooter. This pissed off the core/base DS fans, who were hoping that the game would stick to horror. Same thing with RE6. They turned it into another bland 3rd person action/shooter and people HATED it.

To put it in terms of other media, it'd be like Pink Floyd just inserting a segment of gangster rap into Comfortably Numb so they could "broaden the audience" and get rap fans to listen to their music. Or in the middle of Princess Mononoke, a frickin' Gundam drops out of the sky and starts fighting the giant wolf so that they could "broaden the audience" and get the giant robot fans to watch their movie.

That's why people consider the phrase "broadening the audience" to be a huge joke. To them, it translates to "make the game something it was never supposed to be by emulating what's popular at the time."

 

[RJ 17]

Dead Space 3 was one of those games where they came out and said "We want to broaden the audience for this game" and they turned it from any attempt at being survival/horror into just flat-out 3rd person action/shooter. This pissed off the core/base DS fans, who were hoping that the game would stick to horror. Same thing with RE6. They turned it into another bland 3rd person action/shooter and people HATED it.

When was Dead Space ever horror? No, really, when? this series was always a 3rd person shooter and I am a fan of the series.

Pretty sure that DS1 was meant to be survival-horror. The change they made to "broaden the audience" was to replace "horror" with "action".

 

[FieryTrainwreck]

"We're going to intentionally crash the game you loved into Call of Duty and then hope you're too stupid to notice before giving us $60".

 

[A-D.]

Dead Space 3 was one of those games where they came out and said "We want to broaden the audience for this game" and they turned it from any attempt at being survival/horror into just flat-out 3rd person action/shooter. This pissed off the core/base DS fans, who were hoping that the game would stick to horror. Same thing with RE6. They turned it into another bland 3rd person action/shooter and people HATED it.

When was Dead Space ever horror? No, really, when? this series was always a 3rd person shooter and I am a fan of the series.

Pretty sure that DS1 was meant to be survival-horror. The change they made to "broaden the audience" was to replace "horror" with "action".

Pretty much correct there. Dead Space wasnt a pure horror game by that definition, to be fair no games really are, not even Silent Hill, or Amnesia. They are not solely horror games because horror and its target-emotion, fear, are not universally reached with the same things. Dead Space is survival horror, the same as Resident Evil is and has been since its inception, lets be honest, who was ever truly scared of Zombies, Zombie-dogs, a giant snake, a oversized spider, hunters, nemesis, birkin, Mr X, plant 42, hunter gamma's, ooze's and all the other enemies they ever came up with. The point was survival, horror was just a side-activity of it all, the "boom! ravens through window" moments and such.

Silent Hill is psychological terror, its not so much the monsters that are scary, lets be honest, some are really ridiculous. The idea that the entire town is alive, breathing and wanting to kill you is what set it apart, plus the fog, limiting your view and the radio spazzing out are what makes it good, or made it good anyway. I once spent half an hour in Silent Hill in the damn apartment, with static constantly on the radio, and i never found a god damn monster, its like anticipation with no pay-off.

Amnesia..does the same thing as SH essentially, except its more about atmosphere. The monsters by itself arent scary, the location however is. Even if it isnt truly fear, its that sense of wrongness, foreboding and plain old creepyness of such places as the cistern and the prison. But it shares the "music announces the monster" as SH had, except it can be devious by cutting out the music 5 minutes early and then giving you a jumpscare.

So..horror is a thing which lives by its additional definition. I havent seen a game that you could truly call just "Horror", its always "SomethingElse+Horror" ;P

 

[RJ 17]

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Then we must be remembering differently because I played DS1 as an action game because all the scares were jump scares right out of RE1. By the end had you very high end weapons and all the ammo and health you would ever need; and that doesn't get into new game+. You are a god at that point.

Just because all the scares were jump scares doesn't mean they weren't clearly going for survival-horror. Resource management with ammo, med-kits, and upgrade-chips. The dead coming back to life as grotesque monsters in dark, narrow, bloodied corridors while freaking out and having hallucinations of grotesque visions and watching people mutilate themselves are all clearly survival-horror elements.

Whether or not you were scared by it doesn't change the fact that it's a survival-horror game. That's like watching House on Haunted Hill and saying it's an action movie because you weren't scared by it. Or more relevant: calling Amnesia a puzzle game because you weren't scared by it.

 

[likalaruku]

I actually associate that phrase with everything that's wrong with TV today. Live action on Cartoon Network, wrestling on Sci-Fi, reality shows on Discovery & National Geographic, Things on the Disney Channel they didn't make but bought the rights to, no music on MTV or VH1.....Expanding the audience compromises the integrity until there is no integrity left.