Azrael the cat said:
'we're going the way of the audience' - sounds logical at first, but it's typical of the marketing blindness (in terms of market reach, not advertising) that's restricting the industry. In a truly competitive and quality industry, a major player like Bioware would look at those numbers and say 'hey, we're ALREADY managing to sell to that audience. They'd buy a Mass Effect expansion pack, or a sequel made along similar lines. The PC market is barely tapped, yet we're missing it - we need a product, a new one if necessary, that will get those customers on board.'
They'd be better off with different franchises targetting different crowds - increase production of regular Mass Effect sequels (or add another franchise with mostly the same gameplay elements) if they want to increase console sales.
The problem is the perception that making PC exclusive games is just not profitable. Whether due to piracy, fewer buyers, or more difficult to please buyers doesn't really matter. If it costs the same to produce a PC game and a console game the belief is that the console game will result in many more sales. If you don't care about anything but sales figures it's a no brainer. It looks like Bioware is also realizing that RPGs don't sell as well as other genres. I mean, duh! Everyone else had already figured that one out years ago. So they are going to make the transition to action games set in both a fantasy and a scifi setting. They are just following the money. And they are probably going to try to release a "new" <cough> game every year now that they are a sub-division of EA.
After finally playing Crysis, I have to say that there is a (relatively) new action sub-genre. I will call it a "story based shooter". Crysis had very little in common with the old fashioned FPS that we used to call a "doom clone". Now it's all about following a real story. A trend that I very much approve of. I think we have to stop seeing Biowhore as an RPG developer and start seeing them as an action game developer like Crytek. They make story-based action games.
I tihnk what their sales figures show is that it is very difficult to please both the console kiddies and the older PC gamers with the same content. Console kiddies want undemanding, short attention span, twitchy action games. They don't want strategic combat. They don't want to have to read a 100+ page manual before they can start playing. In fact they don't want to read anything at all, ever. They don't want to have to use a complicated qwerty keyboard or a mouse. If the typical console game is any guide they don't like saving their games either. PC gamers tend to be more sophisticated in their tastes and are much harder to please. Bioware is really only just beginning to tap into the console kiddie market. There is actually a lot more dumbing down they can do. And you can bet that they will. While we codexians trash them, they will be putting gas in their super-yachts.
of biblical proportions. Even if someone thought that DA was mediocre, it was still a RPG.
