Welcome, welcome to the 7th installment of Blog Banter, the monthly blogging extravaganza headed by bs angel! Blog Banter involves our cozy community of enthusiastic gaming bloggers, a common topic, and a week to post articles pertaining to said topic. The results are quite entertaining and can range from deep insight to ROFLMAO. Any questions about Blog Banter should be directed here. Check out other Blog Banter articles at the bottom of this post!
Topic: Does every game need to be a grade-A blockbuster title? Would you be willing to play more average games or should every game shoot for the 10.0 rating?
The problem with aiming a game for a rating is that ratings are subjective. What one person, or one group, considers to be a 10 out of 10, another person, or group, might consider to be only a 7, or worse. As huge of a success that World of Warcraft is, there are in fact people who don’t play it. There are *gasp* people who don’t like WoW.
The main issue I think that shooting for “WoW numbers” causes is that it fails to properly manage expecations. (If you read my blog long enough, you’ll see that managing expectations is a common theme in most things I talk about.) If you have a game that is set in a genre that even given the “best” game it could possibly be is likely to only attract 200,000 users, if you spend money like its going to clear a million or more, you are setting yourself up for failure.
Personally, I like seeing a variety of games come to market rather than seeing one game or game style dominate. As Richard Bartle infamously said, “I’d close WoW.” or something to that effect. The question of this month’s topic is misleading. Would I be willing to play “more average games”? Who decides what is more average? I just want to play more games, to have more options. If companies dump all their cash into less games seeking WoW or GTA numbers, then no matter how “good” those games may be, I think the industry and gamers on the whole will suffer.
So, no, I don’t think every game needs to be a “top of the line” title. I think they need to approach each game as unique and manage accordingly, so that variety can flourish, because variety is better than dominance and stagnation.
Check out these other Blog Banter articles! Zath!, Delayed Responsibility, Silvercublogger, Crazy Kinux, Gamer-Unit, Unfettered Blather, MasterKitty, Game Couch, XboxOZ360, Omnivangelist, Lou Chou Loves You.
Agreed. If more average games means more variety, then we gamers gain so much more.
Very nice article! 🙂
I pretty much wrote the same thing.
Great minds think alike.
Oh, and I like that “emptying my brain onto the internet since 1998” lol!
Funny. I’m one of those people who don’t like WoW. Honestly, most MMOs don’t interest me because the collision detection is for crap and I never feel like people are really role playing.
Lately I’ve been annoyed that there aren’t more games where I can shoot people with laser guns.