He's not talking about what you're talking about. You are referring to a general phrase used in all walks of life. He has mentioned he's speaking of the upstreaming and downstreaming Sean Malstrom talks about in regards to Blue Ocean strategy and disruption. Here's a pic from the article "Birdmen and the Casual Fallacy" to show you what he means in a nutshell:

Those that move up this ladder, like those that begin gaming with Wii Fit/Wii Sports(Non-Fiction Game) would gradually start playing more complex games until they got to MadWorld(3D Action/Adventure). Here's a few paragraphs from the article to help sell the point:

Most of these tiers are self-explanatory. The further upmarket one goes, the more one gets drawn into another world. (Before someone writes me and says, “WHERE IS THE RACING TIER, MALSTROM!???”, realize that the list is not intended to be perfect but just show the difference of segments from upmarket to downmarket.) The non-fiction games do not attempt to pull the player into a fiction world. Games such as Brain Age or even Flight Simulator cater to the players’ interests of the real world. Brain Age promises to make you smarter, Wii Fit tries to get you more ‘fit’, and so on. Wii Sports is popular because people actually BELIEVE they are using the same exact sports skills in the game as opposed to just pushing some buttons and playing ‘make-believe’.

The problem is not that games have become more complex over the years; it is that lower tiered games were becoming less and less made. This meant less new gamers and that gaming became less exciting to the mainstream. Games have become more expensive to make which means publishers have huddled toward the upmarket. Meanwhile, the downmarket was being unused until flash games and online simple games caught on big with computer users.

These downmarket tiers became abandoned and became a ‘Blue Ocean’ where no one was fighting over. Nintendo aimed to become dominant on these lower tiers, the Blue Ocean, first.

Since these lower tier games were the most critical for Nintendo, they put their first string teams to make games such as Nintendogs, Brain Age, Wii Sports, Wii Play, among others. Birdmen, who mistake the downmarket for ‘casual games’ (i.e. retard games), keep putting their third or fourth string teams to make these type of games.

Moving from the 360 and PS3, where games similiar to MadWorld use 8 buttons, a D-Pad and two analog sticks to function and moving them to MadWorld which will likely be easier to get into because of the ease of gesture based controls and less button memorization would actually be going downstream, not upstream.

I didn't diss Ridge Racer, I merely said Tekken was a far more important battle and prize than Ridge Racer was.

I don't completely buy what Malstrom says either, I'm merely trying to correct the OP on his own message because I realized he was reading Malstrom incorrectly.

Onyxmeth = completely knows his stuff and readily cites it.
Funny how he was incidentally sort of using the general phrase correctly though.

The titles that get referred to as "bridge" titles, will help get new players to upstream. I don't think Madworld is one of those, although it could be indicative of an upmarket game of the new values(er, except "family").

The Conduit might be a bridge, but I think the really successful bridge titles will be made by Nintendo themselves, as usual.

Brain Training, Nintendogs etc. Basically any game that doesn't involve a 'mythos' or a world in which it is played.

Yeah he was using it correctly. It was him mentioning Blue Ocean that set off my radar and knew he was now talking in Malstrom terms.

@Rol-I didn't necessarily mean this portion of his writings I didn't believe in. I mean I'm not totally sold on everything he says. This article isn't actually all that bad, but sometimes he's talking about things like when he goes off on Mega Man 9 for having poorly made villains and it makes him sound like a moron. I also don't like his one-sided take on this console gen taken entirely from the point of everything Nintendo does is perfect and everyone else is wrong that has a different approach. He sometimes tries fitting a square peg into a round hole just to make Nintendo come out the winner in an article.

@Soriku-The paragraphs I highlighted should help explain what Malstrom meant by "Non-Fiction game". He uses examples and reasoning behind games like Wii Sports and why they're included.

I think it's his article Nintendo's Shield that pisses me off the most at times. He sits there and degrades Microsoft's fantastic blue ocean strategy of Xbox Live Arcade as nothing more than copying the PC format, and then a few paragraphs later talk about how different, exciting and a great counterattack to a new disruptor Wii Ware is. Wii Ware is nothing more than Nintendo entering the red ocean already occupied by XBLA and PSN. It's things like that, total contradictions and square peg reasonings that make me not like Malstrom a whole lot, even though I will wholeheartedly admit he's the smartest gaming analyst on the net by far, but that's not saying much.

It makes perfect sense. ™

I very much doubt that.

ummm...yeah I'm just gonna let this thread die a quick death. =(

No, it will however be a good game used many times in list wars or purposely ignored in nerdy arguments.

Such a wonderful fate waiting for this game.