Why Industries Choose Decline

The gray net of abstraction, used to cover the world in order to simplify and explain it in a way that is pleasing to us, has become the market in our eyes. The terms ‘Hardcore’ versus ‘Casual’ were not invented by the so-called ‘casual’; they were invented by the ‘hardcore’. They like the labels because the imagery is flattering to them and looks like this:

Ahh, the “Hardcore”. So handsome, so sophisticated, so intellectual, and we require reviews, forums, and shows to show us just how incredible it all is.

And here is “Casual”. So stupid, so unsophisticated, that they need ‘strollers’ and ‘wheelchairs’ in their games for they can only hand ‘one-button-for-instant-win’. Everything must be dumb down for them because they are *retarded*.

Almost anytime a ‘hardcore’ developer or even gamer is displayed, amazingly the former image appears. It shows the person as serious, as brilliant, as sophisticated, as if he were about to explode in exciting philosophy. Also, interestingly, when a ‘casual’ gamer is displayed, almost always the nursing home images come up. It’s been commented before that ‘casual’ is a nice way of saying DUMB as you can replace the word ‘casual’ with ‘retard’ and, shockingly, it fits in how many people use the word ‘casual’ today. ‘Casual games’ sound like ‘retard games’ as if such gamers rode in on the little school bus.

In the post, “Secret of the Casual”, I tried to point out that the secret to reaching the so-called casual gamer was to let them kick ass. And that begs the question, why don’t many game companies want casual gamers to kick ass? At first, there were some real barriers such as complicated controllers that would always be a wall. But now that wall is gone, so what barrier remains? It is that so-called ‘hardcore’ gaming is nothing more than “Watch how I kick ass” and the ‘I’ could be the game company or rabid fans. All the bullet points, for games and consoles, are ways the company is saying how they are kicking ass.

Amazingly, the “Secret to the Casual” was interpreted by many as an assault on the hardcore. It wasn’t called “Secret to the Hardcore”, it was called “Secret to the Casual” for that reason. Next Generation is more of the standard enhancements and sophistication. New Generation is restarting the ‘skill’ line, so to say, so new players can have the feelings of ‘kicking ass’ just as the core does. In other words…

Shakespeare says that ‘Brevity is the soul of wit’ and the briefest way to describe flash gaming’s success as well as the Wii is this picture. When the so-called casual gamer goes to the store and sees three systems lined up before him, with all their features listed, Xbox and PS3 are literally saying: “Buy this because WE kick ass!” due to Blu-Ray, HD, bazillion processors, and online services. The Wii, on the other hand, is really saying: “But this because we want YOU to kick ass!” Now, you, the gentle reader, may think this odd. How could the Wii be saying such a thing? How can the Wii be telling the new customers that “Buy this because we want YOU to kick ass!”?

“Wii would like to play” literally had Japanese guys drive around and presenting a controller to new households asking if they’d like to play. The advertising doesn’t show how awesome Nintendo or the games are, how THEY kick ass. Rather, It all shows the USER kicking ass.

Iwata said at GDC 2005:

Finally, I am most concerned with what we think of as a gamer. As we spend more time and money chasing exactly the same players, who are we leaving behind? Are we creating games just for each other? Do you have friends and family members who do not play videogames? Well, why don’t they? And, I would ask this: how often have you challenged yourself to create a game that you might not play? I think these questions for an important challenge for all of us.

But why create games just for each other? I suspect it is the desire for prestige. Everyone wants to matter. Everyone wants to be loved in other people’s eyes. What we’re seeing is a vicious cycle where the industry is making games for each other and slapping awards and praises on it. It blows my mind that anyone takes Metacritic seriously or any other review averages. Yet, they do.

There is a desire to not just be best selling, but to be ‘critically acclaimed’, to be loved by one’s peers. This desire for prestige from peers creates an industry that is inner looking, that looks inside its walled garden and thinks how wonderful it all is. Real growth would be knocking down those walls and expanding the garden outward.

The movie industry has lately been suffering from one director to another reaching for prestige instead of sales. Many movies are coming out from Hollywood that no one wants to see. They either skew political, sexual, or to the plain bizarre where it becomes clear that entertaining the masses no longer is the passion of the industry. To cover the flops, a kids movie is put out that sells extremely well to cover the failures. Hollywood can make good movies that sell; they just choose not to. Why? They prefer to entertain themselves than entertain the masses. And to entertain themselves would be progressing the medium to achieve a new level of art… of course, ‘progress’ and ‘art’ is defined only by them. When the masses complain such movies are not entertaining but even offensive, the customers are ignored and sales become stagnant or drop.

A more fitting example of an industry that chose to serve themselves rather than customers would be newspapers and television news. When people got hold of the Internet and could read AP news without the middle-man, the criticism and calls for change came loud and clear from the masses. The newspapers and TV news said, “Screw you! We are journalists! We are the standard. Who are you to say what must be done?” It got so bad that many journalists believed they were the fourth branch of the U.S. Government. Whenever there was a government holiday (but not a real holiday), the journalists took off work! When Congress went into recess, so did the journalists. Other sources of news began to fill the void to revolve around the customers such as the Internet, including websites and blogs, and radio. The arrogance of newspapers and TV news has wreaked its revenge. Newspapers are dying, and TV News cannot grow their audience. Check the ads next time you watch TV news, and you will see commercials for old people.

Arrogance is not blowing one’s trumpet at one’s success. Arrogance, in business, is focusing on what YOU want to do while neglecting everyone else. Imagine trying to buy a cake and the baker says, “Hell no! I don’t make cakes for people like you. I only make the type of cakes I want. My cakes are works of art, not something to be sullied by the masses.” Such a baker would not have a business for long.

While Christenson talks that industries keep using sustaining enhancements that eventually overshoot users, my studies of the game industry, and it correlates to other declining industries, that the reason for the never ending sustaining enhancements come from an insular desire of prestige. It comes from developers wanting to entertain themselves rather than customers. This is because of the mistaken belief that entertaining themselves will mean entertaining the customer. This only works for a while, if at all. And it only sells to the market such a developer is in.

Artists have traditionally a problem with the bourgeouis. They see the money matters as stifling their creativity, hate the grind, and want to fully embrace their creativity. Not only are they absolutely clueless on the nature of creativity (which will be another post soon), they actively choose decline. They simply don’t see it as decline. They see it as ‘artistic progress’. Customers see it as ‘game pollution’.

One question I have been asking myself is why did earlier developers not suffer the divide of art vs business desires as modern developers do? One, I think being a garage developer was extremely humbling, and they were overjoyed at simply being able to make a living out of making games… any games. Second, the early game developers were entrepreneurs, not employees. They began their own businesses and quickly learned about sales and marketing. Unlike today, developers didn’t see a conflict between marketing and game development. The two were one to them.

For the past decade, I have read story after story that says, “the games industry is maturing…”, “as the games industry grows up…”, and the constant “as the game industry progresses more as an art form…” Rest assured that the next decade will be filled with the same quotes. Yet, the reality was that the games industry was shrinking, was stagnant, was skyrocketing in costs, and was having less and less ‘genres’ of games each year.

The reason why we get these quotes of the games industry ‘maturing’ or ‘progressing’ is the belief that developers were pursuing art. Of course, they were not pursuing art in anywhere near the case. They were, instead, pursuing whatever the hell they wanted to pursue. That is what they consider ‘art’. So we ended up with ‘darker’ and ‘gritty’ games even though no one wanted to buy them. Next Generation proves that when left to their own devices, many companies will focus on Hollywood-ized type games that no family would play, that aren’t even girlfriend friendly, and the more offensive the content was to the mainstream, the more the developers cheered. Analysts have mistaken high sales to mean mainstream success. High sales can just mean ‘high sales’. When a game, such as Grand Theft Auto, has the public angry enough to cry havoc and allow politicians to let slip the dogs of the state, it is anything but mainstream.

Artists like to cry ‘art’ to free themselves from bourgeouise pressures. The more the game industry pursues ‘art’, the more it declines.

No one goes into the games industry to make money. Developers entered because they enjoyed games and thought making games would be fun. They figured they could be like the old school developers who could make what they wanted all the time. But there is an important difference. The early developers were entreprenuers. It is interesting to note that they grasp more of what is currently going on with the market now.

But perhaps mistaking ‘progress’ to mean to creating art is wrong and that ‘progress’ is to mean more technology thrown in. Sony and Microsoft engineers thought throwing in more processors meant ‘progress’. In games, we are finding larger and more complex engines said to be ‘progress’. But there is a flip side to additional technology. There are rising costs (which are passed to the consumer) and the time of development increases (which annoys the consumer). Lowering costs, which would be lowering prices, and lowering development time which means more games made, could be more valuable to the consumer than the benefits of such new technological game engines.

Christensen thought industries began overshooting consumers based on a narrow focus of sustaining upgrades or a narrow vision of hitting the next growth quarterly which can only be done by the mainstream consumers. Now I see that inside the industry, the charge into overshot territory, even when realized to be overshooting, comes due to a crusade of ‘progress’ from either a technological standpoint or artistic standpoint. This crusade of ‘progress’ will be the blinders that keep companies galloping down the wrong path. It must be removed in order for the horse to turn around.

In the end, it all comes down to “Marketing Myopia”. For those not in the know, “Marketing Myopia” was a famous article that appeared in Harvard Business Magazine about half a century ago. When you read it today, you will notice many similarities between it and Reggie’s speeches. It asks the question, “What business are you in?” Railroads thought they were in the railroad business. They were actually in the transportation business. Oil isn’t in the oil business. They are in the energy business. Many companies think gaming is in the technology business. It isn’t. It is in the entertainment business.

And gaming isn’t a ‘growth business’. Growth business doesn’t even make sense. There will always be a need for transportation, entertainment, energy, among other things common to Human nature. The constant screams of self-congratulations for ‘the growth of gaming’ and ‘gaming’s rising popularity’ has been a smokescreen as rising revenues correlate but doesn’t mean a real connection with rising popularity. Rising popularity in gaming would mean more gamers outside population growth but this is never mentioned because it would break the image some want to cast. The growth was coming from population growth and the industry began taking that all for granted.

When one wipes away all the rhetoric from the ‘casual’ vs ‘hardcore’ nonsense, the real crux of the hardcore lament is that ‘casual games’ aren’t just un-technological and non-art, the customers have zero desire for ‘technology’ and ‘art’. But they do desire ‘games’ and that is what this business is. What hardcore define as ‘technology’, the casual sees it as ‘bloated’, and where the hardcore see ‘games as art’, the casual sees it as game pollution.

The new gamers will move upstream to more sophisticated games, but they will never value ‘art’ as babbled endlessly by online forums or ‘technology’. They will value the social connections the game can make and how anyone can pick up and play it.

The new gamers look for different values in games. If a company focuses on graphics and technological game engines, the new gamers will ignore them. This doesn’t excuse bad graphics and poor engines. But if a company focuses on pick-up-and-play and a social nature to the gameplay, it gets their focus.

As overshooting causes graphics to become a commodity as well as many of the technological aspects of games, the core gamer hits a wall in terms that Next Generation becomes disappointing in creating new experiences. As New Generation blossoms, the Core become more and more interested in the new values as they convert over. The hardcore, those who place the values of technology and graphics above games, will become louder and more shrill as their influence wanes. As less and less games are made for them, they’ll become depressed as they write more crazy articles on the Internet.

And I will be smoking a fine cigar in laughing triumph as the industry shifts to a new direction.