Azarkon vs the Cult of Hardcore RPG Fatalism - can hardcore RPGs sell better?

[Gangrelrumbler]

I kinda agree with Muhammad here. I bought Terraria by accident (was in the bundle with other game I wanted) and I absolutely loved the game. I can never imagine myself buying it consciously because it appears to be an inferior indie minecraft clone while in reality it's a hard crafting based action platformer.

 

[Vault Dweller]

There's no illusion question that you wouldn't have sold more than a few hundred thousand copies at best. Marketing still sells no matter.

''You can't trick people into liking a product that isn't for them.''

This goes against common sense. You can observe people and yourself included most likely regularly buy product on an impulse.

These products weren't out of my normal range though. For example, no marketing would make me buy or even try Undertale. It's just not my cup of tea. Or try e-cigarettes. Or dye my hair. In other words, if you imagine a 10 to - 10 scale, 10 meaning "love it, must have it" and -10 meaning "absolutely haram!", the impulse purchase rarely cross into the negative territory and tend to be around 1-2 :kind of want:

So hardcore RPGs tend to be in the negative area for most gamers. It's just not something they are interested in, which is ok. Kinda reminds me of this chart:

Do you believe that you reaped every possible fans of your genre?

Of course not, but it's a question of reaching them (awareness) not tricking people into buying it.

 

[Azarkon]

Most people don't know what they like until they've given it a fair shot, and even then, peer pressure plays a huge role.

Consider the rise of lobsters as fine dining in the West: originally seen as trash food, "forced" consumption of lobsters during the world wars and the subsequent carry over of those habits transformed it into a socially accepted delicacy within decades. It's not that lobsters started tasting differently. It's that people started seeing them in a different light.

The same is the case for games. Remember adventure games? Remember how they were dead because "no action"? Then came companies such as Telltale. Their recipe: use popular IPs to gain instant market recognition, and follow it up with marketable gimmicks such as "choices and consequences" - in actuality only the illusion of it - but it worked. People loved it, started to look for other games similar to it, and that provided the basis for other, more ambitious companies to step in and revive the genre, giving us games such as Life is Strange and Dear Esther, and AAA games such as Until Dawn.

The way the industry works, it only takes a single, highly successful franchise to make everyone imitate you for the next five years. That franchise doesn't even have to be AAA - Telltale was not an AAA developer. It just has to capture an audience, and marketing plays into that, smart use of existing IPs play into that, and making a quality game, of course, also plays into that.

You could argue that traditional RPGs would never overtake first person action games and I'd agree; but you cannot argue that traditional RPGs were never popular, and that they're incapable of ever being popular, unless you pigeon hole yourself so much that you redefine the genre to exclude all successful titles, while including only the financial failures, in which case, yes, you are setting yourself up for the same fate.

 

[Telengard]

Marketing ain't that easy. There's a thing called backlash, and you dare it at your peril. Peer pressure and such is a factor, but that is why the big boys very carefully make their games so there is nothing in them to get angry over. There is nothing to get angry over, so any one group of people is likely to have no dissenting voices within it. A couple of positive voices in the same group, and no dissenting, and you gots yourself a winner.

That absolutely does not work with a product that can make people angry or frustrated. One dissenting voice, and the peer pressure can oh so easily go the other way. And then you've got hordes of angry people declaring that you "tricked them into buying crap". And your business is now very dead if the angry people are of any number. Not only that, though, you paid good money to engage that crowd, and now they all demand returns. And that deep flushing sound is all your money swirling down the toilet. Lots of businesses have made this same mistake, thinking that marketing is easy and always works, no matter what. But this a realm where even a newspaper spot costs 10,000, and if you don't play it right, you lose way, way more than you gain in new sales.

 

[Azarkon]

Marketing isn't easy, but it's a lot easier when you have the right ingredients to begin with. Again with the food analogy: no one can market shit, because they taste, well, shit. But as long as what you're trying to market isn't shit, as long as it's capable of being enjoyed, then it's marketable. I don't think turn-based CRPGs are shit, therefore I don't think they're incapable of benefiting from marketing. In fact, I think they are very much an acquired taste, and there is room for acquired tastes in the industry.
Yet anyone could see the problem with imitating past financial failures and hoping people would .

 

[Vault Dweller]

Most people don't know what they like until they've given it a fair shot, and even then, peer pressure plays a huge role.

Consider the rise of lobsters as fine dining in the West: originally seen as trash food, "forced" consumption of lobsters during the world wars and the subsequent carry over of those habits transformed it into a socially accepted delicacy within decades. It's not that lobsters started tasting differently. It's that people started seeing them in a different light.

The analogy doesn't work because food requires no effort on your part. Games do. One of the most popular complaints about AoD is about the difficulty. Many people see overcoming challenge as work and not fun whereas our audience consist of people who want that challenge, who want to figure out the combat system and even the odds. That's just one of many limiting factors.

The same is the case for games. Remember adventure games? Remember how they were dead because "no action"? Then came companies such as Telltale. Their recipe: use popular IPs to gain instant market recognition, and follow it up with marketable gimmicks such as "choices and consequences" - in actuality only the illusion of it - but it worked.

What worked? Faking it? Making shitty games with action sequences and fake consequences? Sure. Why wouldn't it? It's like saying, look Blizzard made this great RPG Diablo and it worked! Turned out people actually like RPGs! Who knew, right?

People loved it, started to look for other games similar to it, and that provided the basis for other, more ambitious companies to step in and revive the genre, giving us games such as Life is Strange and Dear Esther, and AAA games such as Until Dawn.

Didn't play, can't comment.

Edit: ok, I googled it.

 

[Azarkon]

Most people don't know what they like until they've given it a fair shot, and even then, peer pressure plays a huge role.

Consider the rise of lobsters as fine dining in the West: originally seen as trash food, "forced" consumption of lobsters during the world wars and the subsequent carry over of those habits transformed it into a socially accepted delicacy within decades. It's not that lobsters started tasting differently. It's that people started seeing them in a different light.

The analogy doesn't work because food requires no effort on your part. Games do. One of the most popular complaints about AoD is about the difficulty. Many people see overcoming challenge as work and not fun whereas our audience consist of people who want that challenge, who want to figure out the combat system and even the odds. That's just one of many limiting factors.

Challenge exists in many forms. I'm sure the legions of strategy game fans out there would disagree with the idea that nobody wants to spend any effort thinking & overcoming systems, and before you dismiss strategy games as a separate genre, remember: the entire genre of RPGs came from tactical war games, and much of the challenge RPGs offer are identical to those offered by tactical war games.

What worked? Faking it? Making shitty games with action sequences and fake consequences? Sure. Why wouldn't it? It's like saying, look Blizzard made this great RPG Diablo and it worked! Turned out people actually like RPGs! Who knew, right?

I'm talking about the gameplay style of adventure games - ie walking around enclosed areas, picking up objects & examining them, solving puzzles, talking to people for clues, etc. Publishers thought it was outdated, pretty much for the same reason you think traditional RPGs are niche - because it didn't have enough "actiony combat." Yet, they've thrived in the last few years with no more "actiony combat" than they used to have. Different genre and different audience? Certainly. But it was the same argument about how games had to be similar to Halo, Uncharted, and God of War to sell, and that turned out not to be the case.

Didn't play, can't comment.

Edit: ok, I googled it.

As I said, different audience, and here I do think you need to open your mind. Adventure games have traditionally had more diverse settings, and that's been the case since Tim Schafer. Some of the most imaginative settings ever invented for video games have come from adventure games, and it doesn't do you any favors to dismiss the genre because it isn't "grimdark" or "masculine" enough.

 

[Telengard]

The big companies don't care about genre. They don't care about games period, not one way nor the other. And when I say they don't care, I mean the suits couldn't tell you the difference between an rpg and an adventure game if you presented them with pictures of both. They really do not care. They didn't drop adventure and rpg because of the genre, they dropped them because of a downward trending line on a sales chart coupled with a downward line in market research interest amongst the target audience.

That's what the suits care about - sales data tables and market research. And you better believe they have decades of research in exacting detail. And while market research has its failings, especially in regards to something new, it is quite accurate in regards to things old and known. And those charts show adventure and hardcore rpg interest flagging. And it's not gotten any better today, either. Which is really bad since there are way more gamers than ever. For the suits, that illustrates a downwards trend in audience share, thus indicating a poor investment.

That's thirty years of data, and lots of rpg companies, with many different advertising techniques and some with sizable advertising budgets. And they all sold roughly the same amount. All of that advertising money, wasted. Because the mainstream rpg audience had moved on. And they still haven't come back.

What's more, Adventures don't actually have more creative settings, they just have a more diverse set of books to copy from, since their core audience aren't a bunch of LOTR/Star Wars epic nerds, with their audience having a slightly more wide-ranging taste. Plus, indie Adventure games never actually went away, didn't actually need Kickstarter, since they were always more mainstream than rpgs and cost way less money and effort to make.

 

[Azarkon]

The big companies don't care about genre. They don't care about games period, not one way nor the other. And when I say they don't care, I mean the suits couldn't tell you the difference between an rpg and an adventure game if you presented them with pictures of both. They really do not care. They didn't drop adventure and rpg because of the genre, they dropped them because of a downward trending line on a sales chart coupled with a downward line in market research interest amongst the target audience.

That's what the suits care about - sales data tables and market research. And you better believe they have decades of research in exacting detail. And while market research has its failings, especially in regards to something new, it is quite accurate in regards to things old and known. And those charts show adventure and hardcore rpg interest flagging. And it's not gotten any better today, either. Which is really bad since there are way more gamers than ever. For the suits, that illustrates a downwards trend in audience share, thus indicating a poor investment.

That's thirty years of data, and lots of rpg companies, with many different advertising techniques and some with sizable advertising budgets. And they all sold roughly the same amount. All of that advertising money, wasted. Because the mainstream rpg audience had moved on. And they still haven't come back.

The "mainstream CRPG audience", in case we're talking about the "second generation" fans of the late 90s and early 00s, never moved on. Bioware games still sell in the millions, which is what Baldur's Gate sold in the early 00s, and it's what their games have always sold. Bethesda has managed to increase their fan base massively, with Skyrim out-selling Call of Duty. By contrast to adventure games, which saw a string of bankruptcies and canceled titles followed by a period of silence, CRPGs have actually had it pretty well. Yeah, large segments of the Codex hate all the CRPGs released after Fallout, but that's not a fair assessment of the market.

Now, turn-based CRPGs did take a huge hit in the 90s when the industry was switching to real-time, but today they sell about as well as they did in the old days - ie upwards of a million copies, with multiple titles in the 500,000 range. Yes, their share of the pie - ie the total market for video games - is drastically smaller than before, but that's because the pie has gotten a lot bigger with the rise of the dudebros. It's no longer just nerds who play games, but nerds are still a large market.

As for the adventure game revival, this has been documented and reported in dozens of websites, so I'm not going to repeat it. The bottom line is that in the last few years we've seen a massive influx of new adventure games and many of them are selling quite well - ie in the millions, which is what led to the recent development of AAA titles such as Until Dawn, basically an adventure game with cinematic graphics.

What's more, Adventures don't actually have more creative settings, they just have a more diverse set of books to copy from, since their core audience aren't a bunch of LOTR/Star Wars epic nerds, with their audience having a slightly more wide-ranging taste.

Adventure games have more creative settings because they can get away with having no combat, but can still be set in settings with combat, ala King's Quest. CRPGs are, by and large, limited to settings with combat, either naturally occurring, else forced in ala Persona. It's very difficult to set a CRPG in, say, the modern world, because unless your protagonist is a solider in Iraq, there's very little room for constant tactical combat ie the basic gameplay of CRPGs.

Plus, indie Adventure games never actually went away, didn't actually need Kickstarter, since they were always more mainstream than rpgs and cost way less money and effort to make.

Adventure games were more popular than CRPGs during exactly one period, and that's the early 90s, when games such as Myst were out-selling all other games. During all other periods and on average, CRPGs have been as/more successful than adventure games.

 

[Whisper]

I think PoE is great, because I don't think it's easy on hard (I suck?) and the setting/plot/quests are very well written imo (see Planescape). Even then, when comparing to AoD, PoE is clearly popamole in gameplay.

Yes, you do.


Also, you suck because you compare PoE to Planescape. Wtf is wrong with you, son?

 

[Telengard]

Rpgs used to occasionally sell a million too. And investors dropped them like hotcakes even then, because the sales crept downwards. And downwards. And that's deadly when investors are involved. But especially so when the baseline sales was only 50,000, as it is for rpgs. Which is essentially crap, in investment terms.

A genre with an occasional million seller is pretty crap too, despite what idiot rpg players seem to think. This is a realm where Tomb Raider did 7,000,000 in 1996. Where Bioware advertised Baldur's Gate as the streamlined version of D&D that anyone could play, way easier than your "Daddy's RPGs" like the Gold Box games, and did 2 millions. And that's TWENTY years ago. Top games doing a million today, at discount, is essentially shit. Twenty years have gone by. Investors don't like things that have gone downwards in sales and profit potential over the course of twenty years. It's idiotic to say otherwise. Much like it's idiotic to say that every single hardcore rpg dev did it wrong for 30 years. Occam's Razor.

What the market is currently showing is profit potential stifled by inflation and low consumer interest, not to mention competition from games with 50x the indie operating budget against a consumer base with a finite wallet. All that's left of hardcore rpgs is the old fogeys, nostalgia, and news stories about a "resurgence" that is more about old fogeys ponying up hundreds of dollars for a single game than something that would be neat, like a larger customer base.

Not only that, there's history of rpgs with creative settings. But every rpg that's tried a more creative setting than LOTR and Star Wars has failed. Why? because the convo goes something like this:

RPG Player: Dev dev dev! Why don't you make a game with an interesting setting, instead of the usual crap?!?!!
Dev: Will you buy it?
RPG Player: If it's good! Yes!!!
Dev: But you buy all LOTR lookalike games, good or not.
RPG Player: Yes! But if you're a competent dev, you'll make something alternative! Because, reasons! And if it's good, I'll buy it! Really, I will!
Dev: So let me get this straight. You'll buy a LOTR lookalike game even if it's crap, but you'll only maybe buy a creative game if it's good?
RPG Player (unironically): Yes!
Dev: Okay. I'm going to make a LOTR game, that way I guarantee you'll buy.
RPG Player: You suck, dev! Here's my money!

Not that Adventure games are that much better. Those devs just rip off people like Steven King instead.

 

[Azarkon]

You can blame investors - ie publishers - for not wanting to invest in smaller projects, and ten years ago that was a big deal, but the recent successes of the indie scene shows that it's not the overwhelming obstacle people thought it was. What actually matters is getting a positive return on your expenses. A million copies sold is too little for a game that cost a hundred million to make. But an indie studio that spent only a few million dollars on a game could easily get by with a million sales, and an individual game maker, such as the developer of Underrail, could get by with a lot less. That's how people such as Jeff Vogel survive - their development costs are so low it doesn't matter that they only sell ten thousand copies each game. Of course, you'd prefer to sell above that because you'd prefer to have production quality beyond Vogel's games, but just because CRPGs and adventure games can't move money the way AAA action games can, does not make them niche.

 

[Excidium II]

Live the indie developer dream earning barely enough to sustain fulltime development.

 

[Lurker King]

Marketing can trick people into buying something, what it can't do is trick someone into liking something. That is the realm of persuasion and psychological manipulation, which is something governments tend to reserve for their exclusive use.

Yes, you can. Most people choose things in a typical herd mentality. If everyone else is talking about how great Undertale is, it must be good. If I don’t like it, I’m wrong. Therefore, I’m liking it.

One can watch the big advertising groups, where they spend 1 million for an ad spot for the Superbowl (yes, it costs 1 million per commercial), and they do get longer reach with that. But they also work hard to make the blandest, most inoffensive, most mainstream game first, so that anyone who tries the game will never run into anything that will bother them. Ever. That way, they don't feel that they were tricked when they buy it. Hardcore games don't have that advantage.

Seconded. The conditions to trick causals to buy cRPGs are:

(1) Irrational hyping artificially created by jornos, which is marketing. However, indie studios don’t have millions to spend on marketing.

(2) Irrational hyping artificially created by artsy hipster groups.

(3) Good graphics, but without a complex combat system.

(4) Present the game in a way that makes it looks like something else, which is practically impossible in a good game.

Unless you have (1) or (2), nothing will make causals buy your game. Even if they buy your game by mistake, they will immediately ask for a refund.

 

[Lurker King]

These products weren't out of my normal range though. For example, no marketing would make me buy or even try Undertale. It's just not my cup of tea.

That is because you have a personality and think for yourself. A lot of people don’t do that, because they just follow the rest, even if this mean buying games they would usually hate.

 

[Lurker King]

Azarkon arguments can be all summarize into something like this: But you can sell hundreds of thousands of old-school hardcore turn-based cRPGs! Just like at these games! He then presents a list of popamole eye-candy MMOs pseudo-combat made in a hurry poor excuse of cRPgs that are exactly the opposite of hardcore cRPGs. If you are not selling like them, you are doing something wrong, you fool! Just look at Diablo, PoE, etc.

 

[likaq]

more ambitious companies to step in and revive the genre, giving us games such as Life is Strange and Dear Esther

This is what codex in 2015 actually believes in.

 

[Lurker King]

more ambitious companies to step in and revive the genre, giving us games such as Life is Strange and Dear Esther

This is what codex in 2015 actually believes in.

That it's in theory. In pratice these beliefs about what the genre was means shit here. Why most people here keep funding, buying and praising isometric popamoles like Shadowrun? It’s Shadowrun in any remotely way like an old-school game, besides the fact that is a turn-based game?

 

[Eyestabber]

Azarkon arguments can be all summarize into something like this: But you can sell hundreds of thousands of old-school hardcore turn-based cRPGs! Just like at these games! He then presents a list of popamole eye-candy MMOs pseudo-combat made in a hurry poor excuse of cRPgs that are exactly the opposite of hardcore cRPGs. If you are not selling like them, you are doing something wrong, you fool! Just look at Diablo, PoE, etc.

There is no need to do any sort of in-depth analysis. He wrote precisely that:

There was a time when I thought no RPG would ever out-sell FPS games such as Call of Duty. Then came Skyrim.

It's...right there. Literally. "Stop being such a whiny defeatist, VD. Skyrim proves RPGs can sell like hotcakes. You just have to TRY HARDER!". That's when I stopped bothering with this thread. If anything should earn you a colorful tag (dumbfuck, possibly retarded etc) it should be a statement like this, IMO.

It's not exactly a surprise that this guy got brofists from all the Tumblertale fans. When one loses all sense and reason, to the point of considering Undertale to be a good RPG despite barely having any gameplay and having as much RPG Elements™ as Carmageddon well...he/she is now ready to accept pretty much whatever bullshit comparison gets thrown his/her way. At least this thread delivered ONE good thing:

For example, no marketing would make me buy or even try Undertale.

So...the AoD-based Dungeon Crawler game won't be about making friendship with poorly drawn "weird and wacky xD" roman-inspired creatures? Wow, great news! Shame Azarkon and co won't buy it, but real life is known for its strong C&C.

EDIT:

revive the genre, giving us games such as Life is Strange and Dear Esther, and AAA games such as Until Dawn.

 

[Commissar Draco]

Skyrim is CoD with swords and dragons and not RPG even one such dull and balanced like PoE was and Comrade VD was proven to be the true Comrade and Bro for not liking this Undertale hipster shyte... So this thread at last has delivered.

 

[Jarpie]

Marketing cant make niche product into mainstream success but it can help to reach the potential target audience. Even the best product won't reach the market segment if they don't know it exists.

The problem for indie products like AoD is as far as I know is that advertising isn't exactly cheap and there's not really any big enough sites where to reach most potential buyers as most gaming media is filled with dumbfucks.

Sent from my Lenovo B8000-F using Tapatalk

 

[Lurker King]

The problem for indie products like AoD is as far as I know is that advertising isn't exactly cheap

There are a lot of things about AoD that makes the sales pitch harder. Price is not one of them. A player who enjoys solid cRPGs, and is not poor, will not miss this game just because of the price.

 

[Jarpie]

There are a lot of things about AoD that makes the sales pitch harder. Price is not one of them. A player who enjoys solid cRPGs, and is not poor, will not miss this game just because of the price.

I meant that advertising isn't cheap, didn't mean the game.

 

[Lurker King]

I meant that advertising isn't cheap, didn't mean the game.

Ok, that makes more sense.

 

[Renegen]

Everytime Vault Dweller opens his mouth, he reminds me why I hate him since he sounds like such a moron. "RPGs cant sell, oh except for half the exceptions". If there is an exception to the rule, maybe the rule was bad in the first place? This is the essence of creative thinking, THINK why some games sell and some don't and it's not because "just cuz".

AoD hasn't sold because it has fundamentally failed to relate to the player, not because of whatever exterior threats VD has conjured up in this thread. Not that I care, dumbfucks that can't see what's behind the curtain will always fail in creative industries.