Street Fighter 25th Anniversary Collector's Set announced
GameFly to publish iOS, Android games
Judge recommends US Xbox 360 ban in Motorola dispute
ArmA 2 'Day Z' mod patch adds sickness
Diablo 3 declared 'fastest selling PC game' ever
The Industry Demographic
by Steve Gibson, Jun 18, 2001 7:15am PDTAn article on AVault this morning by Brad Wardell discusses the demographics of the industry as a whole and who exactly is buying games. This of course plays a huge part in the design and system requirement decisions that are made by developers for the games thay are producing. A lot of this seems pretty obvious but apparently there are some people out there who dont realize that the average system out there for gamers is not a 1GHz machine. He also draws the conclusion that it's currently impossible for a multiplayer only game to exceed sales of a million copies.
The bottom line is fairly straightforward: know your market. Are you making a game for yourself or as a product? The best combo is a title you really enjoy making that you hope lots of other people will enjoy playing (and pay you to do so). Decide on the game you want to do, research the demographics of the likely audience for it and plan accordingly.Yeah that's great and all. Someone out there know where there is public information on user and hardware demographics of gamers? Of everyone out there playing the Quake/Unreal/Half-Life series games what do you think the average player is really running? Seems to me that most publishers and publications would closely guard that information as they collect it.
Comments
EQ has had 200k+ for well over a year. That right there makes it comparable to 600K when comparing to a non-subscription based game.
Note that Lineage alone has over 2 million active Korean accounts. Sure it's a nitche market - but that's something you could drive a truck through.
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My point is. Invasion of people's privacy is not an overnight deal. It happens by people bunny hoping from one form of privacy invasion to the next. Just my opinion, flame away.
Seriously, I don't want to have to pull the ethernet cable out of my NIC during a singleplayer game, and abandon multiplayer altogether. As if MPlayer was bad enough, now we have GameSpy pushing integrated stuff on the game developers. And some of them fall for it because they need funding.
Maybe I'm just being incredibly paranoid, but I'm part of a dying breed who values their privacy over almost everything.
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New Poll Steve? What's your processor speed?
above 1gh
1gh - 700
300-600
below 300
or something like that.
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--Zilla
BTW, I'm buying Anarchy Online when that baby comes out. I think it'll start a revolution. And just wait till Star Wars Galaxies...that's going to sell well over a million copies.
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For all the work that goes into a game, any game that takes longer than 3 years to produce isn't worth it. For prime examples, play Daikitana.
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1. Have a poll and ask them
Drawbacks:
*Only the people who care enough to bother answering will answer.
*People may lie
*You only the sample the people who actually visit that site.
They leada to a skewed sample towards the hardcore gamers...
2. Have code in the software that automatically reports to the developers about the players hardware.
Drawbacks:
*Legitimate Privacy Concerns
*Fantatical Privacy Loony-Tunes.
You look at id software (one of, if not the, most respected developer of pc games). They had a "Feature" in quake3 that automatically reported the gfx card type of the player to id... id didn't store any personal details, probably just linked the gfx card to the cd key. People went ape-shit at them... I believe they removed it, after stating it was only in place to allow them to see what type of gfx cards they need to focus on.
3. A once off, fully disclosed, voluntary, transmission of data about the system when a game is installed.
There are no major draw backs to this system, it would have to be a single "yes" or "no" click... any more than that and people wouldn't bother... (does anyone register games?)
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Hasn't this already been done by Eidos? The later Tomb Raider games anyone?
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Thank you Captain Obvious.
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Diablo2 has sold 3 million copies. They are just now including 800 resolution. Its purely about game play.
Balder's Gates/Icewind/Torment all were 2d. And they looked much better than some 3d games.
Then there is the people who say "Nice game, but I need to buy $500 in hardware to play it? Er.. I rather pay the rent."
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What you need to know is something like 'greatest common denominator minimum spec'.
I think that's currently about 400MHz/64MB ram.
Either that or you deliberately design for a higher minimum spec, and accept lower sales numbers.
the game industry is fucked up, there's the developers. and then there's everybody else who take what job they can get that involves games but really want to be Game God Designers
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Hey, read this interview with the guy who writes the new wallhack.
He states only 5% of the email he receives is hatemail.
I knew the cheating percentage was very high, even tho many shackers seem to be in denial.