March 7, 2010
Niche Market Gaming
By J. Matthew Zoss
There will never be another band
as big as The Beatles.
That’s not to say that there will
never be another band as talented as The Beatles (although that’s also probably
unlikely), rather that there will never be another band as broadly and deeply
loved as The Beatles. It has nothing to do with the quality of current music.
The social conditions simply no longer exist for it to be possible.
When The Beatles first started
recording, there were fewer radio stations, fewer television networks and fewer
record labels. There were fewer alternative forms of entertainment and there
certainly wasn’t the internet. It was much easier for a band to reach a huge
audience back then as it is today.
There are still big hit albums being
sold today. Last year, the number one album, Taylor Swift’s Fearless, sold over
six million copies in the US. But ten years before that, the number one album,
the Backstreet Boys’ Millennium, sold 11 million copies. Whitney Houston’s 1985
debut self-titled album sold more than 25 million copies. The big hits of the
music industry are getting smaller.
The internet is usually blamed for
the decline in record sales, but piracy isn’t the main issue. The issue is the
evolution from mass entertainment to what I call “niche market” entertainment.
As the number of options increase, the effectiveness of the mass market product
decreases. If you don’t like Top 40 radio, there are literally thousands of
internet radio stations to choose from.
Television audiences are down across
the board. That’s because there are more stations, more targeted TV networks for
every type of interest. There are history stations, GLBT stations, right-wing
and left-wing networks, stations about animals and food and anything else you
can possibly think of. Niche market television has been eroding the audiences of
network television for years.
You may wonder what this has to do
with gaming. While the gaming industry is still dominated by huge, mass market
franchises, we’re starting to see the rise of niche market gaming.
Every day, there’s more evidence of
the rise of niche market gaming. Take a look in your pocket. What games are on
your cell phone? Maybe you’ve just got the demos that came on the phone, but the
numbers show that most of you have paid for at least one cell phone game. The
iPhone port of Plants vs. Zombies made a million dollars in the first week
alone.
Look on your Facebook page. I’d be
willing to guess that the average GameZone reader has never played Farmville or
any of the other popular Facebook games (I certainly haven’t), but the companies
that developed them are making millions.
From the dashboard of your Xbox you
can download major console releases like Mass Effect, intellectual puzzle games
like Braid, or even check out the Indie channel and try a game made by a few
individuals in their basements.
Go online and search for independent
games. You’ll find hundreds, maybe thousands. Some you won’t like. Some you
will. You might even find something that involves you far more deeply than the
$60 console you just bought. I’ve spend far more time playing Fieldrunners on my
iPod than I have playing BioShock 2 on my Xbox 360.
Big budget, big name games like
Halo, Call of Duty and Madden NFL will still drive the gaming market for years
to come. That’s what the current industry model is built to support. But niche
market games are on the rise, and if the gaming industry isn’t careful it could
wind up like the music industry – in a state of perpetual decline and unable to
stop it.
Fortunately, the game industry seems
better positioned to deal with the coming shift. Already all three console
manufacturers offer direct downloads of niche audience games directly to your
console, and companies like Activision and Epic are sponsoring independent game
design contests.
As for The Beatles, the band’s
recent video game only proves how much the entertainment market has changed over
the last few decades. As the biggest band in the world, their game should have
been the biggest game in the world, right? No, because it wasn’t a product from
all Beatles fans. It was a product for Beatles fans that were also fans of not
just video games, but music video games – a much smaller and more specific
audience.
A smaller and more specific
audience. Remember those words, because they’ll be shaping more and more games
over the years to come.
