A27 Tawpgun said:
Well this brings up a good point.
Do you cater to the masses who casually play the game. Or do you cater to your dedicated community that's responsible for keeping the game alive?
The most vocal are generally the more passionate. The ones who love Halo the most if I had to say.
I hear this a lot from folks who think they're hardcore because they've been around for a long time. "We're responsible for the success of your game!"
This is bullshit. The hardcore (for EVERY Halo title) is a tiny subset. It's ALWAYS a tiny subset. The VAST majority of Halo players has ALWAYS been more casual than that. And surprise, surprise... lots of 'em come back game after game, even though they're not playing every night! (Or, even bigger surprise, maybe they ARE playing every night - but they're not participating in any online communities, they don't worry about what weapons are on each map, they might not even know the name of the company that makes the game. They just play.)
They're also the ones who LEAVE once a community settles down to 'hardcore mode'. (Look at Halo PC. There's still a community playing that, though it's tiny compared to the number playing, say, Reach. But they're all playing the same thing - Slayer or CTF on Blood Gulch. That's what the 'hardcore' thinks Halo PC multiplayer boils down to - and that's what casuals get bored of.)
If game companies catered specifically to their hardcore fans to the exclusion of everyone else, they'd be out of business. It's really that simple.
You talk about the most vocal ones being the most passionate - but they're also the ones who like what they like. And they don't want it to change. But that's NOT how you sell more games! So while you don't want to piss those people off too much (because they ARE vocal) - you also don't want to focus exclusively on them, because if they had their way, they'd still be playing what made them fall in love in the first place. (Face it - what the hardcore would love more than anything is if someone put in the time and effort to remove the cheating from Halo 2, right? Because that was the best multiplayer ever, right? But the rest of us - and no, I don't count myself among the 'hardcore' in this context, even though I've been in this community longer than almost ALL of you - we'd be bored shitless if that's all Bungie/343 did. And we'd find some other game company to buy stuff from.)
Game companies walk a really fine line when they have a successful title. They have to find a way to make a replacement that's BETTER than what they just did (to convince people to buy more from them) but they have to also make sure they keep the stuff that was great in the first place (because that's what people are now EXPECTING from the franchise). And sometimes, those aren't compatible goals. For a lot of GAFers, Reach went too far with the changes - the 'better' became worse.
But for other people (me, for example), Reach's gameplay is MORE fun than what came before it - at least if you judge by how much time I'm putting into it. And no, it's not because of Armor Lock, or Evade, or ARs, or any of that - I use Sprint 95% of the time, and my tool of destruction is the DMR. But I can LIVE with all that stuff that makes you guys crazy - and that's the difference, I think.
I'm getting away from the original point - the original point is that the hardcore are NOT responsible for the success of the game - by the simple fact that they're a minority. Most copies are bought by people who don't care about most of what you care about. Also, the idea of allowing your 'hardcore' fans decide the direction of your game development is a bad one, from a business standpoint. You can certainly let them INFLUENCE you - but letting them run the ship would lead to ending up on the shoals.
