[GiantBlue76]

Quote: Originally Posted by RACZILLA

You make some good points. To provide a little more context, what I said about who buys year over year is only what I recall from being exposed to research about the purchasing habits of sports gamers. So my memory isn't perfect and even if it were it would be old data as I haven't worked on sports games in a few years. My best guess is that's still largely how it is. I completely agree with what you're saying about players and how they influence others. There's gaming specific research that shows that in social groups of friends there are people who affect the decisions of their peers. So when I sometimes see the debates about whether or not the core football community matters to developers, my opinion is that while core fans may not be large as a %, they can have an impact on how a product (or even a brand) is perceived. As far as what may cause someone to pass on a game there are all sorts of factors. There might be another title that's more attractive at the time. It could be that a game didn't meet expectations as far as how it's improved, as you said. One of the biggest factors IMO is that within social groups of gamers, people tend to play what their friends are playing. The value proposition these days is all about time. How much time am I going to put into a title and is it worth it? Sports gaming has changed a lot over the last decade. The core audience has gotten older. Games have become more complex. The expectations for realism have been raised. There are also other genres that have snatched up younger gamers making it tougher to compete and bring new players into the fold. Overall though I still think there's a lot of opportunity in sports gaming. We may not see days where there are 5-7 games for each sport again, but as long as there are players who are passionate and vocal there will also be developers (and even marketers!) out there trying to bring people what they want.

Excellent post and very informative. Thanks for posting this.

ONe thing that I found very interesting in your post was that you mention the core audience for sports games has gotten older. With the rising expectation for sports games to get closer and closer to real life, why does it seem that decisions regarding Madden's development over the last decade have seemed to attempt to buck this trend? You see all of the other major franchises really striving to hit the realism mark, and have been doing that for several iterations now, yet Madden is just now starting to strive for a higher level of simulation and realism. Is EA simply chalking this up as a mistake? Would appreciate your opinion on that.