Okay, so I was underselling in the last paragraph of my last post. If I had the greed and the gumption, I'd probably be looking for business major to start working with me on a plan for the "New Gamer" brand. I don't know how many articles one could write on Wii Sports, but I'm sure one could make a good deal of money finding out.
Of course, balancing the content would be a very interesting challenge. What games would be suitable for review? If you'd even try to review something like the upcoming Call of Duty Wii game, how would you do it? Would you have the entire review staff (grandma, grandpa, mom, dad, and the tweenagers (provided it's not rated M)) review it? Would you have the entire review staff review every game? Considering many new gamers don't finish games, should the reviewers have to? Maybe the site would be called "Gaming Generations" instead. Of course it's hard to satisfy so many constituencies. Heck, that's a problem even today.
In reading the comments on Kotaku about the state of game reviews, I was struck by how everyone wants to the review to serve them. I like plot and characterization. Write about that in the review. I like graphics. Write about that. I want a reviewer to talk about their feelings as they play. Write about that. I like tight controls, write about that. But nobody wants to pay for their reviews. I subscribe to EGM magazine. That's it. Nothing else. Do you think my $1 a month pays for all the salaries, podcasts, online articles, and the magazine itself? Obviously advertising foots some of the bill, but the point is, how much does $1 a month entitle me to? Not too %#(*ing much, I'd say. And if the advertisers are footing the bill, why should I expect the reviews to cater to my interests?
As far as I'm concerned, GameSpot lost all it's credibility half a year ago. But it still pulls in more traffic than Kotaku, Destructoid, and Joystiq combined according to Alexa. Hell you could add in 1UP's traffic and you might get half GameSpot's numbers on the best day ever. But I'm no activist, telling gamers to use their dollars and page views to vote for better content. I'm a realist and a cheap ass. I'll keep spending the time to find whatever niche core gamers still have out there on the internet. And we'll have them. We'll gather on Quarter to Three or NeoGaf, where we get enough traffic that banner ads can pay for the server load. Hell, the core gaming niche will retreat to Usenet if it has to.
It feels weird to think of us that way. But I'm starting to. The term core gamers should probably be replaced with a term like game snobs. We've got movie snobs and music snobs. As gaming gains broad appeal (in many cases by losing what made it interesting to core gamers in the first place) the term gamer itself loses meaning. I guess it could be less insulting. We might call them game buffs. But if gaming really goes mainstream, I can't imagine it being as complicated or difficult as the stuff game buffs enjoy. Nope, those same nerds who used to be picked on for liking games at all are starting to be picked on instead for their choice of games.
I'm also feeling a strange sense of deja vu that these arguments were all made by Wii haters a year and a half ago. I mean, I essentially asked this question at the 1UP Panel at PAX 2007. Gaming is going mainstream, like movies. Most movies suck. (I actually don't go to the theater any more.) Why won't gaming suck? I didn't ask it well, and the panel basically advised me to buy a $500 PS3 to play a $10 indie shooter that when I finally did buy it on PC wasn't very fun.
I guess it's a little different now, with the Wii continuing to sell more than the PS3 and 360 combined. Although I believe both the Wii and DS are starting to lose steam in Japan. Still, I can't help but feel that Microsoft and Sony are just wishing the other would go away so they could stop fighting each other and be like Nintendo, making a game a few games a year to placate the core gamers and spending the real money on reaching wider audiences.
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