the "broad aidience" myth

[thetenet]

So I saw the "tunder run" trailer for Battlefield 3 and I was beyond exited. While the adrenaline still ran I decided to watch more vids of the game and I stumble with an inteview in gametrailers by the name "pillars of the battlefield" it was all good and nice until the developer being questioned said "we tried to make it less nerdy (perhaps) in order to appeal to a wider audience" that made me mad. I closed the site and started ranting, alone thankfully, about "how this was a compromise" or "another game for kids" and that kind of stuff.

Once I settle I´ve started thinking Who was this wider audience? Battlefield 3 is a military shooter on its very escence it is a hardcore game that will only appeal to gamers. So Who they want to reach? Housewifes won´t play it, nor will old people and casual gamers won´t tough eaither. Any FPS and speacially a military FPS takes some training, building ability. Is not game you can pick up and drop for a while and play it just like that.

In any case I do not know who is the "broader audience" they so desperately want to get. I am still set on getting the game, though I will buy it use so EA doesn´t get a piese of my money.

 

[L3m0n_L1m3]

Once I settle I´ve started thinking Who was this wider audience? Battlefield 3 is a military shooter on its very escence it is a hardcore game that will only appeal to gamers.

Yes, but a wider range of gamers will play it, rather than, say, a handful of the truly hardcore ones.

 

[cryogeist]

Once I settle I´ve started thinking Who was this wider audience? Battlefield 3 is a military shooter on its very escence it is a hardcore game that will only appeal to gamers.

Yes, but a wider range of gamers will play it, rather than, say, a handful of the truly hardcore ones.

yeah pretty much this
also
the gaming companies want more money so this is what they do...

 

[bjj hero]

Draw in people who don't play team based shooters maybe? Sounds like they want the run and gun COD crowd to me.

 

[Katana314]

MISCONCEPTION: These sorts of games are only played by "true gamers" who spend all day on forums.

Plenty of people who spend most of their time at the gym, or at parties, play plenty of Call of Duty when they get home. Battlefield is not a far shoot off from that. You don't seem to have a very diverse vision of people; now that around 72% of households have video games, very different kinds of people are playing them. It's not even like "50% of those people only play Bejewled." If it's easy to pick up and play and looks pretty cool, they play it, even a big blockbuster like Call of Duty or Battlefield. That's where accessibility and a broad audience come into play. They need to be able to go from "Hey, what's that you're playing?" to "I think I'm getting the hang of this" in a matter of minutes.

It may not really hurt the underlying game if the deep elements of strategy are still there, just only present in competitive play.

 

[gbemery]

When one say a "broader audience" I think they mean trying to get people who play different genre of games. Such as instead of just the FPS players they want the FPS, RPG, platformers, RTS etc, or atleast thats my opinion.

 

[MrLumber]

Man I'm trying hard to not be excessively condescending

Anyway, while you may disagree with this, most FPS's are significantly less hardcore than most people make them out to be. In fact the whole reason American gaming exploded is due to the more widely accessible nature of the FPS, there are several other factors but they are all fairly tangential.

Touching on your comment of 'picking up and dropping' these games is fairly funny, most rounds in FPSs, such as Battlefield, at most take about a half hour per round. This obviously means you can easily do exactly what you described.

The thought that most modern FPSs take skill I find rather novel (your comment about training literally made me lol), the 'one hit kill' structure that most modern FPSs adopt actually provides for less competitive gameplay, due to the inherently lucky kills that come with it.

Also, try not to be so close minded about wider audiences. Truth is the current communities housed in online FPS' are essentially as toxic as humanly possible, so its not like your going to get anything worse on that front.

Anyway I'm probably not going to get it regardless as I hate most military style shooters, but I like helping people eschew ignorance when I can.

 

[MelasZepheos_v1legacy]

There's a lot of different things you can mean when you say 'wider audience' which I think confuses people.

As I see it, it can mean either wider audience internally, or widening to include an external audience. Trying to accomodate a wider audience internally is the best way to up sales, whereas trying to appeal to an audience outside your main demographics is probably asking for trouble.

Some examples: Brothers in Arms has a fairly small audience, even within the demographic of 'realistic war first person shooters', a pretty narrow genre in and of itself. So widening the appeal there might be to try and entice people who don't just like war first person shooters, or who might not like realistic wfps, or people who like realism and war but not first person shooters. There may have to be compromises made but the meat of the game, a war based first person shooter with varying degrees of realism, remains uncompromised.

Then there is the Mass Effect example. Mass Effect 1 proved it had a wide appeal. It sold 1.6 million copies in 6 weeks, and has gone on to sell millions more since then. And it sold on the appeal of what it was, a BioWare made third person shooter western role playing game. But EA weren't content with some of the highest sales figures for any XBox title ever, so they decided to appeal to a wider audience, unfortunately, the compromises needed to appeal to a wider audience could only be made by cutting out from the game's core preimse, mainly taking from the Role-Playing aspect in order to beef up the third person cover-based shooting, an idea rooted in the msot idiotic of mass-marketing bone-heads.

So there's the difference. Widening the appeal for Battlefield 3, a game with quite a narrow demographic, could simply mean removing some of the more complex strategic elements, or emphasising the FPS nature of it. It's not trying to appeal to housewives, it's trying to entice more people from the demographics it already moves in, most likely First Person Shooters. Of course, not really being a fan of the series I couldn't give an accurate critique of whether removing aspects would betray the core values, but the quick research I've done suggests there would be ways, assuming also that the developers are intelligent.

 

[veloper]

I reckon you can appeal to a wide audience just through marketing, but you need a core of fans first because popularity needs a seed.
So no need to gut a game. Any shit sells to the general public with a good campaign afteral, but the catch is heavy competition selling that same shit before you get a chance.

So a shooter copying MW, when the COD fans will just continue to buy MW sequels anyway, isn't a good strategy.
The FPS maket is becoming oversaturated, which is prolly why we're seeing this shift towards RPG/shooters. Then there will be too many of those.

It's like trying to be like WOW, which means competing with Blizzard and that means losing. It's better to have a MMO that is different enough from WOW, for the gamers who are dissatisfied with it and take a piece of the pie that way. That worked for EVE. They started small and different enough to appeal to a hard core and have grown since then.

A good way to get a big audience is to invent new shit, like Nintendo did with the Wii and sell it before anyone else does.

So the OP may have a point in that appealing to a wider audience doesn't work. It can work, but most publishers are doing it wrong.

 

[whiteshark12]

Pretty sure that in this specific case, it means trying to get Call of Duty players to buy it. Assuming that my friends are the typical CoD player, then BC2 is stupid and realistic because it has bullet drop, however BF3 looks quite good, so it seems to be working.