Games... Games Have Changed... (rerun)

Game has changed. A lot from my Atari days. Are all those changes bad? No, I think. Most of them are in fact damn good. I learned that most changes come from good. Better saying, ALL changes in consumer products come from consumer demand! 

You may say 'I didn't choose to have patches and DLC and on-line passes'. No, but capitalism works a bit like natural selection and evolution. See, evolution does not happen because living things changes to adapt to the environment they live. The environment changes and the creatures most adapted to those changes survive, while the other ones perish. 

The same goes to products, like videogames. Any change to videogames only strives as long as they sell. So, if people never bought a single piece of DLC, videogame companies would have scratched it away soon. But people buy a lot of DLC. The same goes to the on-line passes. As long as people pay it, they will strive. 

One thing I realized this week is that I am a minority in gaming. I have being playing since my eight years old, and come here to videogame sites, post comments and blogs, yara yara. But I am a minority in the consumer market. Think with me a little... 

Most popular gaming sites articles have 300 comments at max, usually. So, let's say that this 300 are unique comments. Since not everyone posts in all articles and all days, let's say that the number of posters are a 100 times bigger. So gaming sites would have 30000 people commenting today. Let's say that the 100 most visited gaming sites in the world have the same number of commentators. So we have 3000000 of people commenting in those sites. Three million people. Looks like a lot, right? 

Well, Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo sold 180 million consoles this generation, more or less. It means that we, the people who comments in the internet, we are only 1,66% of all the videogame consumers in the world. Not much, right? Even if people like us, who reads a lot of articles, participate in the community where ten times bigger, we still would be less than 20% of the total number. And I am not including portables, PC and iDevices. 

We are not the majority of the consumers. It doesn't mean that we are not important, as we spread information and opinion to others who are not into commenting in websites. So, game companies will try to make us happy from time to time. But we are not where the money are. 

In the end, game will change with our without many of us. We tend to forget that we are not as many as we wish; that aren’t we that are keeping this industry going. Game has changed. Games will change. Will we change with it?