Dragon Age 2 - Call of Duty's Audience Welcome Bioware says

Alrik Fassbauer said:

If I said to a shopkeeper "I want to play an asdventure games", then he or she would have given me Monkey Island 15 years ago.

Now, when I ask "I wnt to play an adventure", I'd get Lara Croft instead.

To m, action adventures and non-action adventures are two entirel different things. If I want puzzles, but get Lara Croft instead, then there's somthing wrong, in my opinion..

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Have you tried the last Lara Croft that turned to be a sort of platform game? Platform games even with action are in my opinion very well suited to include puzzles. In fact there are quite many platform games that are heavily oriented into puzzles.

I'm very intrigued by this new Lara Croft platform game - and if it had been published in retail here, I'd already own it.

But I still don't like buying download-only titles …

Didn't the good (or maybe now not so good?) doctors say that they needed to sell 10 million copies (of DA2)? Maybe that's why the want the audience that play Call of Duty? To be fair, Melo also talked about people who played Assasin's Creed and Fallout 3.

And if they (Bioware) just could get 5% or maybe 10% of the people playing Call of Duty to try and like DA2, they would have added like 1 million (or so) players (gamers) to their overall audience.

But how many of their previous fans are they putting off?

aries100 said:

Didn't the good (or maybe now not so good?) doctors say that they needed to sell 10 million copies (of DA2)? Maybe that's why the want the audience that play Call of Duty? To be fair, Melo also talked about people who played Assasin's Creed and Fallout 3.

And if they (Bioware) just could get 5% or maybe 10% of the people playing Call of Duty to try and like DA2, they would have added like 1 million (or so) players (gamers) to their overall audience.

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I reckon the CoD players who enjoy RPG's are probably already playing DA. I know quite a few gamers and they play a diverse range of games, although some are pure action types, others pure RPG types etc.

KapitanUnterhosen said:

But how many of their previous fans are they putting off?

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I think this is the answer :

booboo said:

I reckon the CoD players who enjoy RPG's are probably already playing DA. I know quite a few gamers and they play a diverse range of games, although some are pure action types, others pure RPG types etc.

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In short : They just don't care. They are effectively aiming at the largest possible audience, imho.

Alrik Fassbauer said:

I think this is the answer :

In short : They just don't care. They are effectively aiming at the largest possible audience, imho.

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Yeah, in the end they assume they are losing less than they are gaining and they are probably right. You can say the same thing about moving to consoles as the lead platform for most of their games… they surely lost some dedicated PC gamers, but they probably gained millions of console gamers. Good trade off from their perspective.

Remember, game development is a business. Especially for these corporations, but even for indie devs... they aren't going to do it without money. If your favorite PC indie developer thinks he/they can make more money on the iPad they will switch over, they don't care if that upsets you.

Yes, that's how business works.

Remember that there are like 10 millioner or even maybe 20 million people who play games like CoD or shooter games. There are maybe like 500,000, maybe 1 million people who would consider themselves hardcore gamers. If maybe 50,000-100,000 wanders off, but Bioware (EA) gains like 500,000 people from the CoD crowd, the point from a business perspective seems clear, doesn't it.

We, as gamers, can regret this. And maybe even be mad about this. But today this is how the industry of games and the games industry works. The business and the industri have changed a lot since 1997; in the 1990s they business side of things were still a small part of most developers objective (or should it be strength). Today, big companies like EA and Bioware needs to think in sales, too...

Imho they don't need to think in sales - they just do so. They could have decided otherwise. But they do so.

Alrik Fassbauer said:

Imho they don't need to think in sales - they just do so. They could have decided otherwise. But they do so.

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We can't expect something different from teams like Bioware or Bethesda and I don't think it's that bad. In fact even if you consider DAO as a failure it's hard to deny that Bioware tried come back to some (I didn't write "all") of older RPG values. They took many relatively risky design decisions in DAO. It seems they want go backward on some points. I never played ME2 and only a little bit of ME1. So I don't know exactly what they want achieve.

But I'm quite curious to see a non anonymous hero. The role point of view is something that doesn't work at all for me, and no matter it's in the tag for this game genre, since beginning in most famous RPG you didn't play any actor roles inside a story.

For sure put this point of view of sells among their main topics for designing their games is a dangerous trap, but not a necessary failure. I don't think that anyone know why COD has such a huge and unique success, I'm sure there's ton of bet about the reasons, but no reason are that clear.

Alrik Fassbauer said:

Imho they don't need to think in sales - they just do so. They could have decided otherwise. But they do so.

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If you read their comments on forums they are very motivated by the collapse of similar old-school PC developers and their desire to not follow in their footsteps. I have seen them say something to the effect of "yeah well look at where Troika is now" several times. The way they stay open and keep making games is to make EA happy, and that means a lot of sales. They have said point-blank that despite Dragon Age Origins' success it was not successful enough to please EA, and thus they are trying to make it more mainstream. They do not hide this.

At the end of the day I would really love it if every game developer thought of the art first, so to say, but then they probably wouldn't make many games before being shuttered. Is it their fault or the general public's? Personally I get a lot more irritated at the majority of gamers who buy Call of Duty but not Arcanum and who choose inferior controls and technology on console for the convenience... those people annoy me a lot more than Bioware, who just need to make money to stay alive.

I rail against the gaming press and the average gaming mouth-breather a lot more than I do developers and those are the reasons.

Let's face it: Since BG2, or maybe KOTOR Bioware has (also) been about the sales. Because, yes they'd know that without sales, there won't be any money to make games anymore. Or pay the bills - or the devs. And that may indeed have been a big influence in deciding to sell(out) to EA. To make sure, they'd still have a company to run, and by they, I mean Ray and Greg.

And Ray and Greg, and the other leads in Bioware have definitely seen Troika, Origin, Interplay (Black Isle) and other companies go down. And why? Because the people at Troika and Origin etc. maybe didn't have that much of an understanding of the business side of things.

Today, to stay afloat in the (big) business industry of making games, you'll need to make (much) money. At least this is so for both Bioware and Bethesda games. The devs. behind and of the Witcher 1 and 2 does not necessarily have to do this. CD Project is both a dev. and a publisher, hence they can forego this, I find.

Others companies that can forego this requirement of selling many games are indie games like Basilisk Games (The Eschalon Games) and Jeff Vogel (spyderweb software) because they mainly make the games with very little resources.

Even an indie company like Radon Labs didn't make it; the company behind Drakensang went belly up. And why? Maybe not enough sales for Drakensang 1 or Drakensang 2: Am Fluss der Zeit (the river of time?)

I don't know why 12 million people have bought the Call of Duty games, nobody probably does to the full extent. But I might have a good idea why. Many young men from 16-21 will take to each other and tell each other of what a nice and excting game they've played. And naturally all their friends will buy it too. However, I'm sure most of them will play it only once or twice, some of them may also be playing it over the internet to stay in touch with their friends. But what does this matter to publisher or the devs. They've gotten their money...

Like EA and Bioware will do from millions and millions of people come March 8th (or March 11 in Europe) this year.