Apple Computer made for themselves a little bit of noise yesterday with a press conference trumpeting their success selling games for iPhone and iPod Touch. The one point I'm going to touch on today is their comparison of number of titles available for their platform vs. Sony's PSP and the Nintendo DS.
Apple quoted comScore's count of available "game & entertainment titles" for each platform as follows: 607 for PSP, 3,680 for DS, and wow check out that huuuuge green bar reading 21,178 for "iPhone OS". But, of course, there's an equally huge problem with the numbers: they're an apples-to-oranges comparison.
Apple's model is markedly different than the other two players, who are still playing their game on the console model. Compared to the hoops you need to jump through to get your ducks in a row with Sony or Nintendo, getting your "game & entertainment title" available to iPhone users is cake. As a result, the landscape looks very different between the two.
And yet, they do still compete with each other. Apples and oranges are both fruit.
This is a long-standing problem I've had with debate surrounding Nintendo's own push to expand their tendrils into new markets. There's always this pervasive framing of the action as a grand battle between the "casual" and the "hardcore", as if they're opposing sides on a huge battlefield, locked in eternal battle-to-the-death struggle to claim the land of Gaming for themselves. (For maximum clarity, imagine the hardcore side as a small but effective group of battle-scarred soldiers, and the casuals as a huge mass of nose-pickers who are only so effective at gaining ground because they can easily overwhelm the enemy with their sheer numbers.)
The reality of the situation is considerably different, though.
Imagine each circle in the diagram above is labelled with one of the aforementioned monikers, "hardcore" and "casual". (They're not to scale, before anyone starts writing in about numbers. I don't care about numbers. I don't think they're all that valid, anyway, as I'll shortly explain.) Now look in the middle, where they intersect. This is a group of people—I don't have numbers, but I anecdotally see them rather often, and I personally claim ground in that area—that can be found enjoying games all across the spectrum. Some people will gravitate as far away from this crossover area as possible, too, and that's fine; entertainment is and always has been a matter of taste.
But to cast anyone out who does not rally to one side or the other is foolhardy. Frankly, I think the labels have done more harm than good, and in some cases have even simply been used totally incorrectly. Some marketers, publishers, and analysts are as guilty of this as anyone, as they try to break down the very complex market (even the diagram above doesn't really do it justice) into demographics. Admittedly, the changing of the landscape makes their job a lot harder, but that should be a sign that it's time to throw out the old formulae, not try to force the human markets to fit them.
To draw this back to Apple's perhaps somewhat-silly boast once again, I think there are two truths at work here. First, the dynamics of their approval model do mean that their offerings of entertainment software on iPhone et al. is largely a big circle all its own. There are also platform differences to consider; even if you disposed of the mechanics of getting a game to market in your comparison, anyone can see that all three platforms physically have very different strengths.
But secondly, there is also crossover; big publishers play on Apple's playground, touch-based puzzlers might work on DS and iPhone, and a more complicated d-pad-and-buttons game could target either Sony's or Nintendo's offerings. It makes the reality of determining just how valid Apple's numbers are a mental exercise of Herculean proportions. But we can at least say they are somewhere between less-than-useful and more-than-useless.
Gaming, as it gets bigger, is just getting more complex; it's defying attempts to pigeonhole it quite effectively. I think that rather than try to break things down, it might be more productive to just keep making or playing games that you find fun. Don't get upset or antsy when success is found outside your own sphere of interest or influence. Just get back to the one thing everyone has in common, regardless of which camp they might fit in, if they straddle the line, or if they defy categorization entirely... get back to having fun.
Apple quoted comScore's count of available "game & entertainment titles" for each platform as follows: 607 for PSP, 3,680 for DS, and wow check out that huuuuge green bar reading 21,178 for "iPhone OS". But, of course, there's an equally huge problem with the numbers: they're an apples-to-oranges comparison.
Apple's model is markedly different than the other two players, who are still playing their game on the console model. Compared to the hoops you need to jump through to get your ducks in a row with Sony or Nintendo, getting your "game & entertainment title" available to iPhone users is cake. As a result, the landscape looks very different between the two.
And yet, they do still compete with each other. Apples and oranges are both fruit.
This is a long-standing problem I've had with debate surrounding Nintendo's own push to expand their tendrils into new markets. There's always this pervasive framing of the action as a grand battle between the "casual" and the "hardcore", as if they're opposing sides on a huge battlefield, locked in eternal battle-to-the-death struggle to claim the land of Gaming for themselves. (For maximum clarity, imagine the hardcore side as a small but effective group of battle-scarred soldiers, and the casuals as a huge mass of nose-pickers who are only so effective at gaining ground because they can easily overwhelm the enemy with their sheer numbers.)
The reality of the situation is considerably different, though.
Imagine each circle in the diagram above is labelled with one of the aforementioned monikers, "hardcore" and "casual". (They're not to scale, before anyone starts writing in about numbers. I don't care about numbers. I don't think they're all that valid, anyway, as I'll shortly explain.) Now look in the middle, where they intersect. This is a group of people—I don't have numbers, but I anecdotally see them rather often, and I personally claim ground in that area—that can be found enjoying games all across the spectrum. Some people will gravitate as far away from this crossover area as possible, too, and that's fine; entertainment is and always has been a matter of taste.
But to cast anyone out who does not rally to one side or the other is foolhardy. Frankly, I think the labels have done more harm than good, and in some cases have even simply been used totally incorrectly. Some marketers, publishers, and analysts are as guilty of this as anyone, as they try to break down the very complex market (even the diagram above doesn't really do it justice) into demographics. Admittedly, the changing of the landscape makes their job a lot harder, but that should be a sign that it's time to throw out the old formulae, not try to force the human markets to fit them.
To draw this back to Apple's perhaps somewhat-silly boast once again, I think there are two truths at work here. First, the dynamics of their approval model do mean that their offerings of entertainment software on iPhone et al. is largely a big circle all its own. There are also platform differences to consider; even if you disposed of the mechanics of getting a game to market in your comparison, anyone can see that all three platforms physically have very different strengths.
But secondly, there is also crossover; big publishers play on Apple's playground, touch-based puzzlers might work on DS and iPhone, and a more complicated d-pad-and-buttons game could target either Sony's or Nintendo's offerings. It makes the reality of determining just how valid Apple's numbers are a mental exercise of Herculean proportions. But we can at least say they are somewhere between less-than-useful and more-than-useless.
Gaming, as it gets bigger, is just getting more complex; it's defying attempts to pigeonhole it quite effectively. I think that rather than try to break things down, it might be more productive to just keep making or playing games that you find fun. Don't get upset or antsy when success is found outside your own sphere of interest or influence. Just get back to the one thing everyone has in common, regardless of which camp they might fit in, if they straddle the line, or if they defy categorization entirely... get back to having fun.