Neil wrote:
I will always remember this quote from the head of TF1 (biggest french TV channel), that translates roughly into : "when people play video games, they don't watch our channel, we don't want to promote them
I don't see how this mindset applies. 3D manufacturers just want to sell their televisions. If it's cinema, video games, home movies, or whatever - it doesn't matter. Whatever justifies the equipment will win. There is no excuse for 3D manufacturers to claim there is no content when there clearly is in video games. We also have the benefit of a well backed study demonstrating the demand for this technology.
This quote was in relation to the mainstream media not being interested in video games, and manufacturers not talking about it simply because they perfectly know that their audience (mainstream journalists) are not interested.
Your experience with the journalist completely ignoring the video game market, is the perfect example of this mindstate.
About the state of gaming in the society, i agree with the general trend of the average age of the gamer increasing, but it is no where close to what the article says. And especially all the economic hopes behind them.
First of all the samples are way to small to be of any statistical use. The ESA survey of 650 people and The Pew Internet & American Life Project survey, claiming a 2% accuracy with barely 2000 samples relatively to the total Canada and US population, is absurd. I'm not a statistics expert, i only went through a statistics 101 course in college, but the little stuf i know about them tells me that these kinds of surveys have absolutely no value.
In fact i don't need to do any surveys to get the same kind samples. I can use my own life as an example : my family, family friends, school, college experience, and now my professionnal work (I have a non computer or gaming related work).
I have a lot of friends who are games and computer geeks, these people are all extremely interested in high tech stuff and play video games regularely.
On the other hand, when i look at the rest of my relatives, i get the completely opposite image, even in my own family : my father who bought an apple II computer when i was 1 year old, showed me computer games and even programmed on it, who bought me my first console (a super nintendo) when i was 6 years old and played with me... he no longer plays anyhting, he doesn't buy any console for himself, he bought a low range laptop for work.
My mother bought herself a nintendo DS, my father barely dare to touch it.
when i bought a wii and bought a wii and brought it home for christmas, everybody played it, including him and loved it, but when i took it back none of my parents bought one.
With the casual gaming market exploding today, everybody wonders what the hell is happening. And so wee see people trying to build up statistics and try to find some answers with these figures. But these answers will always be wrong since the industry itself is making them.
Wherever i go, the vast majority of people i meet are simply not gamers in their heart.
They don't play videogames or videogames hardware by themselves for themselves. They need a reason, they need an excuse to play.
It can be either their kids, neighbours, colleagues at work or a friend or whatever. Then once the console is installed in the living room they give it a try when the kids are in bed, but they would never have done it by themselves.
As I previously said, the Wii/DS mania that happened recently is way too often wrongly understood. The Wii/DS casual gamers play casual games, very few of them are ever converted into the hardcore gamers we would like them to be. This casual gaming audience does not play the same games as us, they do not enjoy highly complex, highly sophisticated and ultra immersive games like we do. It is a completely different world.
Technically it is still called video games, but it's very different from what we call video games.
The gaming population grows and will continue to grow as the gaming kids become adults and then parents it's an unavoidable natural phenomenon.
But you can't run faster than the train.
We are seeing the beginning of videogames becoming a mass market. It started 10 years ago with the playstation era, when early gaming population entered active life, and it's been going on and on and on ever since but we are not even 20 years away from the day when you will finally be able to claim that videogames has finally become a universal medium.
As gaming enthusiasts we would love to this this day coming faster, so we promote gaming and technology and 3D and all the stuff we like. We love when we hear the fun news about elderly people playing wii sports but we really need to keep focused and to always remember what the situation really is in the real world.
We need to remember there is is very important part of the population which is not interested in videogames, first because they haven't tried, and second because they consider them fun for an hour and then switch to something else more "important" or "in the real world" like watching TV or reading a book (I have heard these expressions soo many times i can't even count how many times i heard them).
When james cameron says "3D will be lead by gamers" is it perfectly true, and in fact it is already the case.
Gamers have been beta-testing 3D at home for 15 years. even current 3D monitors are highly specialized devices with huge drawbacks when used as conventionnal monitors : flicker on shutter glasses (almost solved), ghosting on iZ3D monitors (the new glasses are being tested) and colour calibration causing issues with the front pannel. HMDs (are seen as geeky, even by geek standards and are not very popular). And for now 99.99999% of the content is games.
But still... some gamers buy them even with these issues.
The 3D market is still a niche market (gaers + some rare businesses) but this market allows 3D hardware to improve and be more mass market friendly. So that when 3D is finally ready for mainstream mass distribution, it's really good and the market can enjo the technology at once.
Imagine what would have happened if the industry was trying to sell the mass market the hardware we used 10 years ago. How do you think the market would react ?
Or maybe when i see the old shutter glasses reputation i can maybe safely claim it already did, isn't it ?