I think the funniest thing is that the analysts are looking at exactly the wrong things when trying to find the process which results in success. They focus inwards on the core of the industry to find answers, which is a huge mistake in any industry. The core demographic of a given industry, in fact, rarely exceeds 25% of the entire industry's patrons, and is never clearly representative of any group but themselves. If they did represent the whole of their industry, then those industries would be about fivefold larger at least, since everybody participating would be throwing their all into doing so.
The biggest problem is that looking at the core demographic seemed to make sense with video games for a long time. In fact, from the SNES onwards, it made perfect sense. They were willing to disregard the fact that the NES was outclassed by PCs of the time and was less popular with the core gaming demographic of the time, because a new core demographic formed under the NES' watchful eye.
Now it's happening again, in more or less the same fashion. And just like back in 1985, the existing gaming press does not understand that the only reason the core demographic "seemed" to reflect the success of systems was because the core demographic was defined specifically around the kinds of systems that we've seen put out before the disruptor appeared. And the sorts of games that got media attention were the core-demographic-appealing games, while titles which did not fall into that convenient niche were only vaguely mentioned at best, then brushed off and ignored.
In short, they're just continuing the same assumptions they have been for the last two decades or so. The problem being that those assumptions were based on a flawed model of reality.
Sky Render - Sanity is for the weak.
