outlawauron said:
sundin13 said:
Not really...the problem is how they drive the market. They are largely a casual userbase who is deeply ingrained in certain franchises (Call of Duty, Madden), however, the market clamors for their attention. This can be seen in the FPS war that took place over the last generation, which featured a lot of games that were extremely similar, had very high budgets (and high marketing budgets) and often were considered disappointing for players and for the companies.
I wouldn't say that they are really doing harm, just that the AAA market is harming itself by trying to chase this market.
Perhaps you could say that they are doing harm by allowing certain franchises (mostly sports related) to be annualized by continually purchasing them regardless of quality. They allow these games to be profitable without much work, which discourages the companies from actually taking the time to make a good game (why put in effort to make a good game when you can just slap a new number on a box and make money off of it).
Overall, I'd say the effect that the "Representation Pressure Groups" and the "Dude Bros" have are both fairly minimal, and while they are good things to be generally aware of (for when you see an example of pandering that is over the top), they don't actually matter that much at the end of the day (imo).
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See, where they're not having the same impact is that this group doesn't demand certain ratios or have things removed from games. They just buy what interests them, which is how the market should work. If they aren't interested in something, they don't go campaigning to have it removed, censored, etc.
You can claim that developers are shoehorned into making games for this audience because it's profitable, but that's a very different argument than changing a game's content as to not offend or meet some arbitrary quota.
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Thats true enough...however, while some campaigning does exist, I doubt that it has much of an effect. If you weigh the positives against the negatives, it would probably come close to evening out. The positives being that companies feel less like they have to only have white male protagonists and are better able to express their creative freedoms (we have heard numerous times that female protagonists are a hard sell to publishers) and the negatives being that some companies may feel forced to shoehorn in diversity against their own best judgements.
That isn't to say that these "Representation Pressure Groups" should be ignored or applauded - I think we should call bullshit whenever they pick an undeserving target (like FFXV) - but I think the harm they do is fairly minimal.
