The nice thing about sub-markets is that you can find all sorts of blue oceans within the limits of the demographics your relied-upon product appeals to. If you're really good, you can even extend what demographic the required product appeals to.
Over 20 years ago, a little collaboration between three renowned Japanese artists (one musical, one graphical, one programming) resulted in the invention of the simplified RPG genre (also called JRPG), and Dragon Quest became a blue ocean product that captured the attention of the Famicom's userbase. Not long after, a company made a similar game to Dragon Quest that tried making things more complicated but still accessible. And in the west, their would-be final product led them to become the international name in simplified RPGs, with the Final Fantasy brand name.
Also around that time, a clever software engineer called Will Wright was toying around the idea of with what he called "software toys": not really games by the standards of the time, but definitely still fun to play. He came up with an idea for a "software toy" that let you build and manage a city without much effort, and both SimCity and the no-goals simulation genre were born.
Less than a decade ago, a little game company came along and decided they were going to make online gaming accessible to the masses. They took the idea of the simple puzzle game, figured out how to streamline it so it could be played quickly and easily by anybody, and then released it online. The resulting game, Bejeweled, took over the online gaming scene like no other game had before and propelled its maker, PopCap Games, into fame and infamy.
You see, the true secret of the split in market success has absolutely nothing to do with some overarching 80/20 split, or any sort of constant pattern. The market divides and grows according to single events, which trigger many other events. Every shift has an origin point. Some look only at the shifts to try and solve them. I look at the origin points to find the reason for the shifts.
Sky Render - Sanity is for the weak.
