Weekend Confirmed 114 - Diablo 3, Max Payne 3, Lost Planet 3

"People"

Who are you referring to when saying, "people", "gamers", "them, they"?

One quite that is fantastically succinct by Andrea:
Well, that's the problem that (Kingdoms of Amalur) Reckoning had, right? People were still playing Skyrim and it wasn't a better game than Skyrim

I know who these people are. The same people. The gamers, the hobbyists, the hardcore; the most apt way of describing them is the people who play those types of games.

I've posted previously that the notion that similar products released around the same time get less sales is a fallacy. NPDs from 2006-2010 all proved this point when I cited it. Real quick, if you don't recall: iPhones were selling more and more and more and when a breakout game sold, it sold just as well and with whatever system it was on. Specifically, huge iPhone sales and App sales, but when Mario Kart debuted, Wii sales were insane. The same data even suggests that when a terrific game comes out, games similar sell better.

So back to the hobbyists. It is not a problem to be a hobby gamer, enthusiast gamer, what have you. I'm one, and I'm confident all lurking here and posting here are, too. We're only 1 million constant and 5-6 million periodically when out in force, purchasing games. We are a minority in the industry, and we only have so much time.

Jeff simply doesn't have enough time to play DIablo 3 and Tera. Add 6 million more people with that same problem, and bam: 6 million people playing Diablo 3 and not Tera, not Reckoning, not [insert game]. This isn't to say they won't play it eventually, but really we hobbyists tend to flock to the high-profile stuff. How do we know this? Back to the sales! The high profile "hardcore" games sell in the same range. The rest competing for our already RAVENOUSLY competitive market share get shoveled to the side like morning snow.

My interest here is information. I want you all to KNOW why X game isn't selling millions, why Y MMO isn't "succeeding". Yes, let's talk about "success". It's not as nebulous as you might think.

The goal of a business is to serve people. They get the infrastructure to serve people by making customers. Why customers? They have the money. Businesses that focus on short-changing, profit hustling, and make-or-break ventures that strive to capitalize beyond anything else fail in the end. Always. Every time. "Sustainability" is a bit of a shadow puppet thing. If you aren't generating more revenue though making new customers, you're business is dying. Why? Everything slowly gets more expensive. The electric bill in your studio building, costs of raises and bonuses to your staff to get them to make better content, the water bill, the lightbulb replacements, the internet service, EVERYTHING about the infrastructure of the process gets more expensive with time. If you want to sustain, you have to grow your market.

If you're an indi dev and just want to get out a game to please people and you bypass these traditional means of making and getting your game to customers, then any combination of these things can affect you. One of the great things about the scene is the ability to bypass some of the infrastructure problems plaguing high-profile and traditional game makers. Keep in mind, Minecraft has a general total of 9 million across all their platforms. The last 2D Mario game is staring down 50 million+.