More Fun To Compute said:
One third of households is a huge success.
Wii has sold more than 70 million units worldwide.
The most popular Zynga title supposedly had more than 70 million users.
Davinci Code by Dan Brown apparently sold 80 million which is a bit more. You can't tell me that Dan Brown does not appeal to the mainstream.
I'm not talking about success. I'm talking about mainstream appeal.
And the worldwide sales figure is meaningless, as there are over 7 BILLION people in the world and trying to estimate market penetration based on "worldwide sales" when approximately 30% of the world's people don't have a television set is a stupid idea.
And thanks for bringing in a completely unrelated random statistic that happens to have the same value as your previous one. Is it 70 million monthly users in the US? Or is it worldwide? If it's in the US alone, there are over 310 million people in the US, 70 is less than one fourth of that. If it's worldwide, again that's meaningless.
Look, mainstream appeal is my point. To say it a different way, video games will never have mainstream appeal because they are not easy to talk about with other people.
You can talk about a book you've read, a movie you've seen, your favorite TV show, cook book, furniture store, or brand of bubble gum. You can talk about these things with ANYONE in the rest of the world because they will have the exact same physical experience as you did. When they watch the movie, they'll see events unfold in the same sequence you did, they can buy the same couch, chew the same bubble gum, etc. You can then talk more about your personal experience of doing these things, why you like one person or fabric, how you compulsively cheered out loud when the main character in your current book got out of a tight spot in the nick of time. You extrapolate on how your life experiences colored your experience of the book, or movie, or chair, and you can compare that with the other person, but you'll both be talking about the same fixed, physical object.
Try and talk to someone about how you got your unique-drop, double-bladed axe of flesh-bane in the Woods of Fendurian from a Warg boss in the RPG you're playing.
That's about all you can say. It's as interesting as saying, "Oh, I found a $10 bill on the ground yesterday." And will spur as much conversation.
Playing a video game is all about personally experiencing the story that's written. Most video games have really shitty writing. Mostly, I think, because everything revolves around the singular experiences of the player character. You can't have a rich story when everything that happens is directly related to the actions of one person, or group of people.
For example, I'm re-reading the Lord of the Rings right now. Try to imagine a video game where you are playing Frodo. You'd lose more than half of the story after the Fellowship of the Ring because you'd be trying to get to Mordor, and learn nothing about Rohan or Gondor, save for what you might learn from Faramir, and then struggle through exhaustion just to get your finger bitten off right before actually throwing the ring into Mount Doom. Everything about the Ents, the Rohirrim, Denethor and his relationship with his sons, the battle of Pelenor Fields, and the destruction of Minas Morgul;
everything else you'd have to be told about by someone who is not the player character, and that would just ruin the pacing of the game.
If you don't like reading all of the ancillary text in games, then you'd have a hard time playing a game based on The Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy because Douglas Adams spends pages upon pages making little asides about various bit characters, or the history of planets that Arthur Dent might find himself on, much to his own chagrin.
You can't tell a story in a video game the same way you can in the passive mediums. This is why I say that video games will never achieve mainstream appeal.
