This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things

There’s something wrong with the modern gaming landscape. Something just isn’t right. I don’t mean the hacking and the piracy and the arguments over the pre-owned market and online passes, either. There’s something bigger going on that people don’t really seem to notice.

Let me go back to the beginnings of this current bout of paranoia. The US sales figures for Child of Eden and Shadows of the Damned were reported late last week. Both seem to have hugely under-performed. We hear stories like this all the time. Creative, imaginative games that are a bit different fail to inspire the market while iterative yearly sports franchises and incremental FPS developments storm the sales charts.

[drop]Hey, don’t misunderstand me. I like FIFA, Madden and Call of Duty as much as anyone so please don’t think this is an attack on them. They deserve to make their sales. But something about these two cases, specifically, bothers me and I think I’m only just starting to realise what it is.

Child of Eden is as much a sequel to Rez as we’re ever going to get. In all but name it is an evolution of that much loved psychedelic rails shooter. Rez is a game with a hugely vocal band of supporters who have been noisily clamouring for a sequel since shortly after it was released. They got their sequel and nobody bought it.

Shadows of the Damned isn’t a perfect game. There is a certain clumsiness in the controls and it is somewhat overstated in its general approach. But there seems to be an ever-present background noise from people moaning about games getting too serious and losing the fun. Everything from Grand Theft Auto to the Resident Evil series has been accused of forgetting the kitsch sense of style that made them massively enjoyable. Shadows of the Damned has that feel in spades. And it’s got a pistol called Boner. What more do you want?

So, why? Why did these two games, which should surely have been popular, stumble to an uninspiring sales record?

Summer is an odd time of year in the modern video game release schedule. Publishers still want their games to come out just before Christmas so they pull in the maximum gift spend possible. We now seem to have a second release spike in late February and March, doubtless to get titles that slip their intended pre-Christmas release date out before the end of the financial year. Even June, the end of another quarter, was fairly brisk for game releases this year. But July and August are very quiet. Was the apparent failure of two very decent games simply a matter of timing? Is the summer still really that quiet for video game sales?

Similarly, marketing budgets seem to be spent on safe titles. There seems no doubt that publishers have worked out that pumping advertising millions into games that are sequels in huge franchises yields a large enough boost in sales and public perception that it’s worth more money than betting on slightly less well-known titles. I haven’t seen much advertising for either Shadows of the Damned or Child of Eden amongst the pre-order banners for Modern Warfare 3 and the billboards for Battlefield 3.

[drop2]Perhaps it’s something slightly less simple though. Perhaps the problem isn’t with executives or marketing managers. Perhaps the problem is with us, the consumer. I mentioned earlier that both games seemed to fit in with an idea that I heard a lot of demand for. Either the sequel to a popular game of yesteryear or a return to the off-the-wall wackiness that we remember from the previous generation. Perhaps the problem is that the people asking for those games to be made simply don’t buy them.

Perhaps the noise being made is just a very vocal minority which gives the impression of being a driving market force but is really powerless when measured against the people who only buy the year’s Call of Duty, FIFA or Madden game. They’re even more powerless when measured against the people who only buy gift cards for Facebook credits or iTunes downloads. The people who used to fund the development and marketing of our games are now funding the development of games for someone else entirely. There must be a reason for that.

I blame the internet. We’re a separate little ecosystem online and we forget far too easily, that we’re only a small proportion of what ends up filling the profit columns on the publisher’s spreadsheets. We think we’re vastly more important than we truly are. We’re the core, after all. They have to cater for us, right?

The truth is, the average 7-year-old with his Penguin Club cards and his 12-year-old sister with her Facebook credit are probably spending more per month on games than you are. And neither of them want to play Shadows of the Damned or Child of Eden, more’s the pity.