In this very interesting article “Can You Create a Must Have Wii Game?”, Pachter’s comments seem very out of place. Most of the time, Pachter’s comments are given their own story by lazy journalists who email Pachter, get an email back, and copy and paste his comments to generate a story that says: “Analyst says…” In this article, where reality is being stated (by those who made the best seller), Pachter’s ‘comments’ stand out like a sore thumb.
But we’ll return to Pachter later, he isn’t what is relevant to this article. This article quotes Midway developers as to why their games, Game Party and Game Party 2, which got like 25 on Metacritic, ended up selling millions.
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3956/can_you_create_a_musthave_wii_.php
But Joel Seider, the executive producer of both games, says that the public’s interest in them stems from the developers giving them exactly what they crave.
WHAT! How outrageous! What an insult to this glorious industry! It is the end of gaming! How dare a game company produce games that the people want!
While I am joking above, this perspective is adopted by many in the industry. If Gamespot thought the game sucked, and customers like the game enough to keep buying it, who is right? Does Gamespot and the game reviewers define quality? Or is it the customers?
To hell with the reviewers, the customers are the generators of value. Joel Seider understands this. It is no great secret that if you want to sell something, you need to take the customer into account, these same customers that Core Gaming find ‘annoying’ and ‘troublesome’.
“We leveraged one of Midway’s historic strengths and the fact that I had been at Midway way back when it was making the old coin-op games,” he explains. “When you design and build an arcade game, you’re trying to get someone to have a lot of fun in a short period of time; you’re not trying to make some big, open-world MMO.”
“And that concept translates well to the type of person who is a Wii gamer, a large percentage of whom would call themselves casual gamers. They may play Game Party for an hour or so, but in fact they will probably play a few of the mini-games in the collection for just 10 or 15 minutes each. So we had to design for a very short gameplay experience.”
I’ve always linked the Wii customers to NES and arcade era customers. Midway is entirely correct about these new gamers… except they aren’t really new. These are the Original Gamers, the ones who bought Pong, the ones who played Space Invaders.
The anomaly is that those who grew up with game consoles and, channeling their youth into the machine, mastered the games and demand greater challenges. Normal people don’t want to spend the next five years mastering a video game console. They want to play NOW.
Arcade gaming is such an excellent example of how to reach the Wii gamer. Arcade gaming developed in a business environment where the player could easily walk away, which happened frequently. Arcade games had to be extremely addictive and extremely difficult so more quarters are fed into the machine all within a minute or two of game time.
I do disagree with Sneider on the MMO games. World of Warcraft is a Blue Ocean Product. It intended to ‘casualize’ the MMO experience with rest XP, easier quests, and so on. Some people say WoW destroyed the MMORPG market just as people say the Wii destroyed game consoles. But the truth is that WoW built the modern MMORPG. So even MMORPGs have to orientated toward the Arcade Gaming era’s sensibilities to a fashion.
In fact, Seider claims that he chose his development team for the titles — Big Bear Lake, CA-based FarSight Studios — specifically because the 20-year-old company goes back to the old 8-bit console days and has experience creating arcade-like games, such as Pinball Hall of Fame.
“When I was doing my due diligence, they proved to me that they had a good understanding of how to attract the casual gamer,” Seider added. “Not every developer knows how to do that.”
The Retro Game Developers are now on the cutting edge of the game industry! Who would have thought?
Remember a generation or two ago when an old time gamer would remark, “These retro games are good!” and some Playstation-4-life type gamer would snarl, “Shut up, old man! These games have 2d graphics! And you can beat them in five minutes! Now, games have full motion movies, take 60 hours to beat, and have EPIC storylines!”
”That is not good gameplay, though. And these storylines stink anyway.”
”What! Are you against advancing the game culture? How dare you wage war against ‘Game Art’.”
”But you see, I am for a customer culture, and when that is obtained, sales happen.”
”Retro games are retro because they suck. Who wants to play old arcade type games anyway?”
”Look at all the flash gamers on the Internet. Even when you mod games like Warcraft 3, you end up playing flash type games like ‘Tower Defense’.”
”Retro games are the past!”
”Their time will come again.”
It is that time now.
“Instead, we focused on our customers. In my mind, they are eight-year-old kids and their 40-year-old parents who are more concerned about getting good value for their dollar than photorealistic graphics.”
Focused on customers!? What is Sneider trying to do? Destroy the game industry? Hasn’t he learned, from reading various hardcore editorials, that focusing on customers is wrong? That instead, he needs to focus on hardcore game reviewers and message forum addicts? What is this guy thinking!?
Oh, that’s right, he is trying to run a business. And that is why this approach ends up being more artistic then the games designed solely for ‘art’. It cannot be art if no one plays the game. And to co-opt a phrase from Steve Jobs, real artists MAKE CUSTOMERS. Real artists sell.
And because ad dollars are typically limited for value-priced Wii games, some of those interviewed believe that sales are more dependent on positive word-of-mouth than for other gaming platforms.
The customer needs to be able to load up the game, understand it immediately, and not be frustrated by the longer learning curves that are typical elsewhere. And then to tell their friends about it.
A good way to save money is to fire most of the marketing departments in the games industry. All that stupid hype and really dumb commercials don’t work. At least, they aren’t the best value for cost and reward.
Word of mouth has always been king with gaming. Arcades, which were social centers, were very much moved by word of mouth. Children on playgrounds would talk about the best NES games. The Wii sells so much because of word of mouth.
When customers are happy, they tell their friends so they can be happy too. This is why the purpose of the industry is to create solutions for the customer, not solutions for the product. The PS3 is considered the ‘best’ product among the game consoles. But it isn’t the best value according to customers. What the customers value defines the product value, not the other way around!
The secret to insuring that the controllers were easily utilized by the casual gaming audience was to “playtest, playtest, playtest using outside casual gamers,” reveals Guignard.
Playtest!? You mean Guignard actually brought in non-developers to play his own game? Incredible! Who would have thought this?
And the idea of actually bringing in this light gaming audience to playtest the game? Amazing!
Now, I am being sarcastic, but I do so to point out just how dumb as rocks the Core Industry is. Shouldn’t it be common sense to keep the customer in mind when making the game? Isn’t it common sense to playtest the game using such customers? You know, like a ‘beta test’?
When I worked on games long, long in the past, the secret ingredient to make the game fun is to play it over and over and over. Customers will not pay money to ‘playtest’ a game hence the outcry over buggy games, games-demanding-patches, and unbalanced games.
If you want to prosper, let the customer prosper.
Now let us hear Pachter explain it.
“The Wii audience isn’t sophisticated enough to know whether the game they’re buying compares favorably to, say Gears of War or LittleBigPlanet, because they probably don’t own an Xbox 360 or a PS3,” Pachter explains.
“They buy the Wii games that they buy for the same reason that people go to McDonald’s. McDonald’s doesn’t win a lot of restaurant critic awards but they are approachable, they’re consistent, and you know what they’re going to serve you.”
“I mean, who sells more food — McDonald’s or Ruth’s Chris Steak House, which certainly serves better meat? Nintendo has become the fast food machine. Sony is very much the high-end restaurant. And Microsoft is somewhere in between.”
The reason why Pachter’s comments seem wildly out of place in this article is because he is saying the very opposite of what Midway’s producers said.
Midway: “Our games succeed because it met the audience’s different, but still high, expectations. The audience is smart.”
Pachter: “Wii games succeed because the audience has no expectations. The Wii audience is stupid.”
This is the divide going on between these two quoted sources. Let’s hear Pachter trash the Wii audience some more.
But even more important than creating a game that “feels right,” says Wedbush Morgan’s Pachter, is coming up with a concept that the Wii audience understands immediately.
“If the concept is right, if the recognition factor is there, if you ‘get it’ from what’s on the box, sometimes the game doesn’t even have to be that good in order for it to sell,” he admits. “When a housewife is in Wal-Mart and sees Jillian Michaels’ face on Jillian Michaels Fitness Ultimatum 2009 for Wii, nobody has to explain it to them.”
Good… to WHOM? Pachter thinks that value is generated by the product which is why he bet behind the PS3. But value is generated from the customer. This is why Midway’s games were successful. They saw that the value of the games come from the customers, not from the developers and not from the ‘product’ itself.
It is dishonest to say that licensed games tend to sell more than original game titles to be a Wii specific thing. It has always occurred in this industry. Licensed NES games outsold many original content games. Some were good (Ducktales), some were not (Silver Surfer).
When someone treats the Wii audience as an invader, as an anomaly, as something unnatural to the industry, they will keep getting the Wii audience wrong. Wii audience are the arcade gamers. Midway’s producers get it.
Pachter might want to start doing some retroactive analyzing and go back to the 8-bit generation and earlier. He’ll find that the Wii audience is not new. These are the type of people who built the game industry in the first place.
