Do Game Genres Die?
Daniel Cook (AKA DanC of Lost Garden, one of my favorite blogs) has an article at GamaSutra entitled "The Circle of Life: The Game Product Lifecycle." It is an interesting approach that takes the classical product / business lifecycle model, and applies it not just to a single product, but to entire genres of games. He cites examples such as the text adventure, the graphic adventure, and the "traditional" RPG as examples of game genres that have gone through all of the cycles... Introduction, Growth, Maturity, Decline, and finally niche, where they are all but dead except for indie developers and retro fans.

Intriguing? Yes.

Does it model some patterns we have seen? Undoubtably.

But I still call foul on it. I find it very dubious that you could apply the product lifecycle to an entire genre, though he does site some examples where, at first glance, that would seem to apply. And I could think of some others, like the combat flight sim (which, in the early to mid '90's, seemed to be a license to print money).

But I think Cook is reading far more into the wrong set of statistics than he should be. He uses numbers and explanations of how the mainstream publishers tend to react to the market, but then assumes that it is a mirror for the market itself. Ideally and on a large enough scale, this should be the case, but I believe he's mistaking the trunk for the elephant here.

For example, it doesn't matter if a genre had 200 games released in 1990, but only 10 games released this year. If all 200 games in 1990 only sold a combined total of 10 million units, but the 10 games released this year sold 15 million units, would you really say the genre is on decline? Niche? Even seeing the sales numbers would only tell part of the story, but it would be far closer to a measurement of the actual market.

The Death and Rebirth of RPGs
He explains the resurgance of the RPG genre after it seemed to be well and truly at the tail end of the "Decline" stage and entering the "Niche" stage as the supplanting of the "traditional" core RPG by 2D and 3D "action RPGs." However, in citing Diablo as the introduction of a "new" genre, he fails to note only a few months later, Final Fantasy VII - a 3D but otherwise very traditional cRPG that was another evolutionary branch from Ultima III - was going on to beat it in sales by something like a factor of 3:1. Baldur's Gate would later go on to also make a pretty big dent in things, not resembling Diablo nearly as much, in this RPG fan's opinion, as 1992's Ultima VII. And let us not forget Fallout, which didn't achieve Diablo's numbers (or Baldur's Gate's), but still achieved market success that - based on anecdotal evidence - seems to have been right up there with the numbers from the heyday of the RPG - it's "maturity" stage.

In my mind, the genre didn't decline so much as fragment - a product of its own success. The 2D action RPG was an old concept on its own (Ultima VII had some action elements, and there was Gateway to Apshai on 8-bit machines, and...), and the 3D action RPG has been around longer than the first of the Elder Scrolls series (1994), or even before Ultima Underworld (1992). I remember playing one with line-graphics (and the "fake 3D" of early Wizardry / Bard's Tale fame) on my friend's TRS-80 back in the early / mid 80's. I just remember it had a heartbeat that you had to keep at a reasonable level so your hero (who'd obviously not been watching his cholesterol levels) wouldn't die of a heart attack. Those "sub-grenres" finally grew in popularity to be recognized (by some) as their own category. But back in 1995, it wasn't "action RPGs" or "core RPGs" that were "dead" - it was all RPGs, with games like Daggerfall and Ultima Underworld not being recognized as a separate category to make models fit.

Is It the Market, or the Marketers?
Cook seems to be right on the money when it comes to graphic adventure games. The failure of the incredible Grim Fandango to hit a solid market penetration is somewhat inexplicable - though I guess you might start by comparing the marketing effort put into it versus, say, Half-Life (which was released at about the same time). Part of it might have been because the game left very little room for a sequel --- and it seems that it's always the second and third game in a franchise where all the marketing efforts on the original finally begin to pay off.

Who knows?

But I do have high hopes for some upcoming and current graphic adventure games - yes, now being handled by the indies because the big publishers won't touch them. But what are the sales numbers for the new Sam & Max series, I wonder, particularly once the whole bundle becomes available?

Cook bases his model not on units sold (a very difficult number to come by), but on number of titles released by major publishers. While in theory this should follow total sales, the truth of the matter is that the big publishers chase last year's biggest hits - period. And not necessarily the true "biggest hits," either, but the most visible (and heavily marketed) ones. It's a highly incestuous (and cannibalistic) industry that really only plays "follow the leader" 80% of the time. You need only look at the change in attitude of the mainstream console game developers after the sales numbers of Geometry Wars for the XBox 360 Live Arcade became known (and THERE'S a "niche" genre if ever there was one... didn't that one die out in the 80's?)

Other Media
Let's look at other media for a moment. Do genres die out there, too?

Arguably, yes. Kind of. For example, the short story format really faded after the decline of the "pulp magazine" as a distribution format in the 1950s, didn't it? Is the short story now niche? Some might argue so. But the genres remain the same - only the format and the preferred means of distribution have changed. Fantasy adventure stories seemed largely a product of the pulp era, and all but disappeared by the time the Lord of the Rings novels were published. Its only in the last 20 years that the "fantasy" genre really began to take off and getting its own shelves in book stores. I'll invite more literature-inclined folks to comment on the short story in general. I think they might take offense at it being called "niche," however.

How about the movie western? Those have declined sharply since their "maturity" stage in the 1950's and 1960's. Are they now a niche genre? Some could argue so. However, while the quantity of westerns has sharply declined - the audience is no longer willing to pay for anything with horses and stagecoaches appearing in the theaters - I don't think it has hurt the sales potential. There have been several westerns that have done quite well long after the genre could be declared "dead" - think Tombstone, Young Guns, Shanghai Noon, Back to the Future III (a sci-fi Western... hey, we mix genres all the time!), Unforgiven, Dances With Wolves, Maverick, and Zorro.

Niche - Or Maturity?
Ultimately, I think this comes down to mislabeling the categories. Any time a new genre is introduced and experiences rapid growth, it gains a surge in popularity that feeds on itself and gains some level of "critical mass." We can see that happening right now with casual games. We saw it before with pen-and-paper RPGs (which has always been kind of niche - but it also experienced growth and decline - several times, as a matter of fact, most noticeably with White Wolf's World of Darkness games and the release of Dungeons & Dragons 3rd edition).

After this period of excitement and enthusiasm, which can last months, years, or even decades, the popularity inevitably declines as the market fragments, new options become available, or technology changes the rules of distribution.

In my mind, it is AFTER the initial "fad" rush where the market could and should reach its period of stability and maturity. But mainstream publishers in the games business share a lot in common with the most fickle of fans. They are constantly seeking out "the next big thing," hoping to cash in on the rising wave of a genre heading towards its peak. As a result, any genre showing signs of decline finds itself shunned by publishers, and games in that "product category" find themselves cut, under-funded, and under-marketed... which of course accelerates the decline and turns the genre's death (or niche-dom) into a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Of course, games in any genre do have to continually evolve and re-invent themselves. Audiences will only tolerate "more of the same" when the genre is new and exciting (at least to them). Again, this contributes to the apparent decline in "the market" as publishers discover that, after publishing nearly 200 "action platformer" games a year from 1988 to 1991, the audience is no longer interested in snatching up every crappy little low-quality "me-too" platformer that happens to make it out onto the store shelves. The market does change - it becomes more mature and demanding.

But rather than meet that demand, the industry in the past has just abandoned its audience instead in search of fresher, less demanding markets. Which also might explain why the videogame industry has been very slow in "keeping up" with the average age of the gaming demographic. They have only this last decade decided to market more to college-student age players rather than younger teens, even though the average gamer now is in their late 20's. The younger they are, the less jaded and demanding.

Of course, my model of gaming audiences doesn't explain what happened with Grim Fandango, either. But it does explain the First Person Shooter genre, which in terms of number of games produced is also well into it's "decline" (I think) from its hayday of the mid-to-late 90's, yet still manages to push out astonishing sales figures for games like Halo 2 and Half-Life 2.

I believe that as the game market and industry continues to mature, we'll find that the decline and "niche" phases of product categories (genres) will not decline so steeply, but will rather decline and then level out - and even experience more moderate growth - over the long haul.

Of course, as an indie game developer and seller, I really have a vested interest in NOT dispelling what I believe to be a myth. After all, what the big guys choose to ignore is fertile ground for the the little guys to come in and make a killing.


(Vaguely) related ranting of some guy who needs to quit caffeine again:
* Why the PC Game Industry Sales Numbers Are Baloney
* Digital Distribution: Who Gets My Money?
* The Trick to Making 9.9 Times More Money Selling Indie Games
* The House the Mouse Built

(Oh, and I would like to direct your attention to Scorpia's Gaming Lair, where she discusses this topic as well...)

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Labels: Biz, Indie Evangelism, Mainstream Games

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