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Future MMO Prospects |
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RE: Future MMO Prospects |
05-06-2014, 10:59 PM
(This post was last modified: 05-06-2014, 11:16 PM by Flickering Ember.)
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RE: Future MMO Prospects |
05-06-2014, 11:47 PM
(This post was last modified: 05-06-2014, 11:52 PM by Zyrusticae.)
(05-06-2014, 09:26 PM)Ashren Snow Wrote: Group A is offended by the lack of "androgynous female character models" so the developers add them into the game to try to appeal to a wider demographic, however they've now aliented Group B because the idea of a non-standard female body is disgusting, or at least foreign, to their sensibilities so they find the addition offensive and are now in the same situation Group A was in before the addition.Wut. This is too weird. Since when has a game ever suffered for being more inclusive? I want examples. This whole hypothetical scenario just sounds incredibly, incredibly silly. The only thing that I have actually seen being offensive to people is the inclusion of a race like Elin, who are basically weird sexualized child hybrids and the issue with those isn't even their bodies, it's just that a bunch of folks have a difficult time divorcing their appearance from the idea that someone's trying to sexualize children. And even that is only a problem because it's so overt - you don't see anyone tossing a shitfit over the inclusion of Lalafell in FFXIV, do you? Meanwhile, allowing people the option to create feminine males and masculine females doesn't disgust anyone except for maybe the most extreme individuals (who you likely aren't aiming for anyway) because they don't have any of those connotations. FFXIV, in fact, is pretty much proof positive of this - it's very easy to create a very androgynous female Roegadyn (as noted previously), female bodies in general have subdued assets, and some of the males easily cross the line into bishounen, and the game doesn't suffer for it at all. That's because, unless you do the Elin thing, being inclusive only helps you: it doesn't suddenly preclude a bunch of customers who are suddenly SO OFFENDED that you DARED to cater to those individuals who now have options to represent themselves in-game. Who even are these people? What proof do you have that they exist? Even WoW itself flies in the face of such an assertion considering female Tauren, Dwarves, Gnomes, and Goblins all exist. Also, your statistic is patently wrong. Female gamers make up a considerably larger portion of the MMORPG market than you might think. Also of interest, among male players in general their preferences vary enormously. By shooting for what you THINK is the primary demographic you can very easily exclude a number of players who are unaccounted for. Just aiming for "the WoW demographic" is incredibly silly and self-defeating considering that not one MMORPG has managed to catch up to its numbers; it is essentially a social phenomenon. Excluding players, intentionally or not, can only serve to shoot yourself in the foot over the long run. And, dare I say it, even WoW itself may have had higher numbers had it a greater variety of character models than what's currently available. Since it doesn't, we just don't know. And come on, really. There's cynicism out there, I know, but to think that there is honestly a contingent of people who are absolutely disgusted by any depiction of a female that isn't completely, cartoonishly sexualized? Furthermore, that this contingent of people could somehow equal or cancel out all the people who are interested in such characters? Come on, man. There's a limit to how much you can stretch my suspension of disbelief. |
RE: Future MMO Prospects |
05-07-2014, 08:48 AM
Let's remember that we also have a tendency to skew our own perspective. Â I just dropped in to check the official Wildstar forums. Â There is a post on character body types and one on their glamour system, but there seems to be a lot more discussion going on about mounts right now.
Roleplayers might care about very finite details in character creation, but for the most part, we're just not that big of a demographic. Â In WoW, I used to wonder why they didn't have more customization options for characters, why we couldn't have more characters per server, why they never seemed to give roleplayers anything we could use. Â Turns out that things like the transmog and barber systems were just fine for most players' purposes, and I wasn't aware of just how babied we were as roleplayers. Â I haven't seen any other game give us dedicated RP servers except Age of Conan, and their RP server was FFA PVP. It was only when I looked at the realm list that I realized how few of those servers they actually need to house us roleplayers and those people who play with roleplayers. Â I mean, FFXIV doesn't even have dedicated servers for RPers. Maybe that's the sort of thing I would think should be added later if it can't be added now (as well as a fantasia-potion sort of thing). Â That might be a major development, but it might be more understandable. Â I guess, stepping back from my narrow RP window view, I could understand a developer wanting to spend their limited time resources elsewhere for launch; obviously they need to make a good video game first because we roleplayers can barely keep a decent book series afloat with sales by ourselves. There's probably less excuse for games like WoW to not have better customization except that they'll probably try to replace the entire game in a few years. Â But given how fast they have to get these games out, get them hyped, and get them recognized before they get the big FAILURE stamp, I can easily see why variable shoulder breadth isn't the highest on their list of priorities. Â Outside of this forum, I've never heard of a game succeeding or failing due solely to character customization. And like I said, as a roleplayer, it's not even top of my list of priorities. Â I'd much rather have WoW's limited character generator and an RP server than having all these customization options but not having a place to go where I know I'll find RP. Â If I was going to pick my battle, I'd say dedicated RP servers are the ground I'd like to win and hold. |
RE: Future MMO Prospects |
05-07-2014, 11:23 AM
(05-07-2014, 11:12 AM)Ashren Snow Wrote: As for the ratio of female to male gamers in MMOs, you also have to consider how many female players also play male avatars. My FC is actually a pretty even split between male and female players, but amusingly enough most of the females playe male avatars This is in no way a common thing across MMOs and has more to do with FFXIV's male models not all being steroid beefcakes - the same reason a lot of women play male high elves or male castanics in TERA. "Song dogs barking at the break of dawn, lightning pushes the edges of a thunderstorm; and these streets, quiet as a sleeping army, send their battered dreams to heaven." Hipparion Tribe (Sagolii) -  Antimony Jhanhi's Wiki |
RE: Future MMO Prospects |
05-07-2014, 11:31 AM
(This post was last modified: 05-07-2014, 11:33 AM by allgivenover.)
(05-07-2014, 11:12 AM)Ashren Snow Wrote: As for the ratio of female to male gamers in MMOs, you also have to consider how many female players also play male avatars. My FC is actually a pretty even split between male and female players, but amusingly enough most of the females playe male avatars A counterpoint: my coil static is an even split and all of the females play female characters. This is a great demonstration of anecdotes not being evidence in action. |
RE: Future MMO Prospects |
05-08-2014, 09:40 AM
Not to derail the subject but it's not just marketing video game executives.
I've heard some awful logic and decision making processes behind the merchandise marketing head honchos for things like cartoons and comics. I usually don't like io9 but here's what Paul Dini had to say about one of the cancellations of a show he worked on and the WTF-thoughts about it. It's not just that they think/know that the demographic is what sells. It's that they're not willing to change their mindset about it. They want to sell particular items. They don't want to think about marketing to -include- a different demographic; they want to keep that same demographic no matter what. |
RE: Future MMO Prospects |
05-08-2014, 11:42 AM
(05-08-2014, 09:40 AM)ExKage Wrote: Not to derail the subject but it's not just marketing video game executives. There's worse than that. Â I used to work at a company that had a contract with Starbucks. Â I designed them for overseas, specifically Europe, the Middle East, and Asia (seriously, there's a four story nightclub of a Starbucks in Abdul Amman in Jordan I worked on, coffee is srs bsns out there). Our branch wasn't run by principle architects, though, they were run by a set of MBAs in the back. Â They tried to "streamline" us in two ways. Â First, they opened an office in Mumbai to try and handle some of the Revit grunt work on the cheap. Â Second, they stripped the team down to one actual architect, the rest were all designers in certification and interior designers. Â Third, they started taking on an enormous amount of projects, figuring these things would increase our capacity. What happened was that the Mumbai office never got anything done. Â They couldn't retain staff, what staff they retained was ineffectual. Â So they always had half the staff we expected. Â So we had to handle everything, and there was only one architect to handle ALL of the official stamping and oversight (we were pushing out five projects PER PERSON one week). Â Which meant our huge volume overwhelmed the stripped-down staff. Â They immediately put us into mandatory 48 hour a week shifts (which didn't matter, I was doing 60 hours a week just to meet the deadlines I had, and there were people staying longer). A month or so of that, of missing deadlines because of the Mumbai office and having construction admin issues because of checkset oversights, Starbucks decided to drastically scale back our work. Â Dried up overnight. Â They decided to start laying off staff. Â I was caught up in the second round of that. Â In the end, almost the entire team quit and left the firm hanging because they were sick of how it was being run. Knowing business doesn't mean you should run a business. Â Sort of the reason otherwise shockingly good developers like Capcom are in trouble right now. Â MBAs that don't know games are running the show. |
RE: Future MMO Prospects |
05-08-2014, 03:47 PM
Man, you guys are depressing.
I don't deny the often-cruel realities of business today, but all that just leads me to this question: What about all those games that do make a major point of being inclusive (which, I will note, can simply be a side-effect of giving the player tons of control and options)? What excuses do other publishers/developers have for not following their example? In the case of Western games I can sort of understand because Western developers tend to be on something of an island in that they don't really pay that much attention to the efforts of Eastern developers, but then you compare what Elder Scrolls Online has for its character creator versus Wildstar and I'm just sort of scratching my head at it all. Such a huge disparity. What's going on here? |
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