Violence, atrocities, blood, injurious language, they’re all ingredients that make up an M-rated game. But no matter how repulsive these ingredients might appear to some, they’re also the ones that ensure a video-game’s success.
At least this is what a recent study in the US, conducted by Electronic Entertainment Design and Research, has proven. The new study, called Console Intelligence Brief 2007, doesn’t say anything very new and spectacular, but it does mention the fact that M-rated games (for mature audiences, meaning 17+ in the US and 18+ in other areas) have the biggest appeal to gamers.
Basically, we all know that if you build an online component for a game you make it more attractive to gamers, because you open a way for social interactions with other players who like/play the same title. The brand strength also increases (think of what Counter Strike meant for the future development of Valve’s Half Life franchise) and the life span of the game also increases. Moreover, games that receive positive reviews sell up to five times more copies than games that are reviewed as lame or bad (we have a recent example with 2K Games’ BioShock, which has already shipped more than 1.5 million copies since its launch in late August- so less than a month- after receiving some of the highest marks from popular gaming sites, some of them even calling the underwater first person shooter as “perfect”).
“In the increasingly expensive and risk averse publishing environment, understanding the market and a better knowledge of the features that resonate with your customers can help game makers use their creativity to develop titles with blockbuster sales potential,” Geoffrey Zatkin, COO, EEDAR, said. “EEDAR's mission is to help publishers and developers make informed decisions about how to build games and market them. We stress hard facts and ease of readability in all our reports and services; good data means nothing if you can’t understand it.”
EEDAR’s study takes in consideration how all three next-gen consoles, Xbox 360, Wii and PlayStation 3, have faired on the market since their respective launch until June 1, 2007, and also analyzes the games available for them in terms of genre, ESRB rating, gross sales in the United States, Metacritic scores, online functionalities, multiplayer capability and other core game features.
The surprising conclusion is that although all consoles sport online connectivity, less than half of the games available for all platforms (45 percent) are effectively harnessing this feature, with 98 percent of the games built for Nintendo’s Wii being solely intended for single-player.
Most gamers here in the US apparently prefer mature-rated video games because they are usually associated with high scores in gaming-related site Metacritic, which combines multiple reviews from different high-profile sources (IGN, GameSpot, etc.) and comes up with an overall score for a specific title. The M-rated games with high Metacritic scores account for just 10% of all US retail games examined by EEDAR but have the highest average gross sales in that area. Games which achieved a Metacritic score above 90 grossed sales up to 531% more than the industry average, but were less than 2% of all titles released.
First person shooters like BioShock usually find more owners than games from any other genre (they have the highest gross sales), while the action genre- in which shooters are included- is the most prevalent in the gaming market (more than 24 percent of the titles are in this category).
If anyone had a doubt about Nintendo’s thriving business based on Wii’s ever expanding popularity, the following data should shatter all doubts: the casual-gaming console released more than twice the number of retail and downloadable game titles than either the PlayStation 3 or Xbox 360 during the first 7 months each platform’s launch.
Computer and video games are rated by the Entertainment Software Ratings Board (ESRB) whose system includes age recommendations and content descriptors.
According to the Entertainment Software Association, In 2005, only 14% of games sold were rated “Mature (M),” as compared to the 85% of games sold rated “Everyone (E)”, “Teen (T)”, or Everyone 10+ (E10+) [49% rated “E”, 32% rated “T”, and 4% rated "E10+"]. Eighty-five percent of all games sold in 2006 were rated "E" for Everyone, "T" for Teen, or "E10+" for Everyone 10+.
The same source mentions that the second most popular genre among players is the sports genre, (17 percent; the ESA’s estimates indicate that the action genre leads with 27.5 percent in gamers’ preferences for 2006), while the most popular online games are the puzzle/card/trivia/board games.
The US computer and video game software sales grew six percent in 2006 to $7.4 billion – almost tripling industry software sales since 1996.
