"Broadening our audience"

[Sexual Harassment Panda]

Doesn't it usually mean removing the element(s) that makes the IP engaging to it's fanbase in the first place, in the hope that blandificating (now a word) it will lower the barrier of entry enough to encourage more sales?

Meaning nuanced cult film series become bland genre films and games with mechanics that require mastery get auto-jump-correcting-features and QTE's in place of actual combat mechanics.

I never want to hear the phrase uttered about a coming installment in a game series that's dear to me.

 

[Vor Yang]

The one thing that I will never understand about the whole "broaden the audience" thing is that, if said game has sold well enough to have a sequel made, why the hell does it have to appeal to more people? To me it basically comes across as a screw you to the fans of the original and a piss poor excuse along the lines of "This game sold well therefore we shall milk it of every last cent" At least that's the way it seems to be these days.

 

[Flutterguy]

My inner accountant child is really sad the new Elder Scrolls game doesn't have a character stat system as hard to learn as Autocad. Having to level only certain major and minor stats in unison that allowed for 3 +5 stat boosts every level made me feel like a damn wizard. Having the full paper map sprawled before me with notes showing master trainer locations and ingredients combinations for the best potions... Come to think of it I can see why they dumbed it down so much. I really wish they gave an 'oldschool' option for Skyrim, Oblivion and any future games... I'll just have to live with my Morrowind running with over 100 mods and crashing every hour. /sigh

 

[FieryTrainwreck]

My grief is when people come out and say stuff like "casuals are ruining the industry" because a company wants to shoot for a wider audience. I also wanted to offer up a perspective on how a company might think about this problem.

I'm kind of split on this. I mean it's pretty silly to accuse other consumers of ruining an industry because their choices and preferences don't align with your own. Let them have their games while you focus on the devs who cater to your tastes. Everyone wins, right?

Unfortunately, this is almost never how it goes down. Instead, publishers co-opt the games and genres that we love in order to tap additional markets while still carrying those previous demographics (us) through (what amounts to) sheer dishonesty. They take something like a survival horror game and inject it with a bunch of space marine run-and-gun bullshit (including multiplayer). The goal is to sell to that CoD crowd while keeping all of the previous fans (aka suckers) on board.

Saying "the casuals are ruining things" is misguided but indirectly true. Their existence as a lucrative growth market is what temps publishers to constantly "pull a fast one" on the gamers who supported their previous projects and contributed to their initial success. We should be directing our anger at the publishers, of course, and doing whatever we can to make them understand that the whole "broadening the audience" bit only works if we continue to fall for it.

I guess it's a matter of context and/or reading between the lines. When someone gets mad at casuals, I don't always feel like he/she is literally mad at those specific people. He/she is usually just frustrated with the circumstances leading to the diminishing stature of his/her preferred games.

 

[Stephen St.]

I guess the thing with broadening the audience is - you can't. You can change your audience, and that is what mostly pisses people off.

Having a broad appeal comes from being a quality game - in your specific niche. If you are a (admittedly not hardcore) survival horror game like DS1, the only way to "broaden" your audience is make another survival horror game, but better. What people mean when they say "broadening the audience" means switching the niche, for example, to a scary shooter with RPG/survival elements. That is what DS3 (which I consider a great Co-Op game by itself) was. The fact that some people who play survival horror games also play scary shooters doesn't mean you have broadened your audience. It just means that the new audience you switched to also has some of the same people in it.

It sounds like splitting hairs, but it's the problem with the phrase: "Broadening" implies that things get added, not lost. But what happens is that the entire old audience is "lost". If you were in that audience, but are not by chance also in the new audience, that means the game is dead to you. Nothing has been "broadened" from your perspective.

For me, DS3 was good because I happened to be in the audience that also likes a good Co-Op shooter. By comparison, the recent switch from X3 Albion Prelude to X-Rebirth killed the franchise to me, because I am in the "complex space sim" audience, but not in the "Action shooter in space" audience.

 

[Signa]

The fact that a game series is getting sequels means that the original fan base was more than happy to buy your game to the point you made a profit and are willing to do it again. Dont piss them off or fuck with them to try to draw in others.

I think you said something critical here, but fell just short. Fixed it for you.