A worldwide phenomenon without a single research - How it also affected the gaming industry

[RedoLane]

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The world is filled with passion for video games. At the Arcades, at Home, and even at gaming conventions, the main goal is to deliver the most interesting, most appealing, and most attracting video games.
To every video game, there is a creator, a company, a group of independent people with a desire to show their creativity, and even us...the target of the industry.

Some of these facts can be reflected on other businesses all over the world, such as Movies, food chains, everything which the producer can provide effectively for the customers, us, and earn his big bag of cash to put in his "very secured" safe. But there's a specific phenomenon, a chain of events which reflect a massive change in how today's industry works.....and that goes for the gaming industry as well.

To that phenomenon I gave a name, which reflects the whole idea: Mutual Selling. Not to be confused with the term "Trading", Mutual Selling reflects the idea of letting the customers sell their ideas and/or products to the community/group which they came from, officially. As a twist, the customer, who for a long-time bought the company's products, becomes the actual seller to represent them.
Even in commercials, for example, one of the recent Coca Cola commercials was directed by a person, who didn't only bought their drinks and products for a very long time, but is also aware of the most affecting elements in their commercials, psychologically That's why the company gave him a shot, and he nailed it.

So how did Mutual Selling also affect the gaming industry, you ask? There are more obvious examples to put on a table, but i'll give just one of them, which I also took a part in:

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2 years ago, Christian Whitehead started working with SEGA on Sonic Mania, one of the most successful Sonic games to exist. The main reason that it was so successful even at selling, was because the fans who took a part in, already knew what most of the fans have wished for. The situation where fans deliver a great Sonic game for other fans officially is none other an affection of the Mutual Selling phenomenon, and that fair example led to other groups to act the same way.

That is why nowadays, companies don't mind advertising how they recruit their customers to try their upcoming video games, up to the point that they gave them an opportunity to host one of many important events, such as E3's press conferences(Even though it was the least favorite this year, EA's Press Conference this year was hosted by one of their fans).

Now that I introduced you to Mutual Selling, let me clarify one last thing: This phenomenon fixed the attitude that other companies took to themselves all these years.
They understood that their approach to selling wasn't so affective anymore, and after bringing the fans to the roundtable, stuff have changed....we actually got good games from the franchises we were disappointed of for a long time, other destructive approaches were removed from the field, such as lootboxes, and other genres have seen the light of day, after being prisoned on their national area.

In conclusion, in order to bring good games to the communities, it's not only the businessmen who need to take a step, but also us, the fans, who should offer our ideas, advice and support.
After all, it's not only about the game, but also the people who play it.

So what do you think? What is one of your favorite(but currently ruined) franchises that if you had an opportunity to improve it, you'll have the motivation to do it?

 

[FAST6191]

I am a filthy ROM hacker so anything I could want to have a look into I could, moreover translations are not my thing really and where improvements and total conversions (quasi sequels very much a part of all that) are my thing. I do also occasionally man the request sections for such places and despite the barrier to entry there being... technically trivial but to realise you could get something there takes a bit, or at least quite a bit more than hitting some company up on the social meeja, the requests are frequently less than stellar.

Equally on Sonic then I don't know if it has been confirmed they lost the source code to it, like Sega themselves said for various other games, but the emulation and "porting" approaches they used over the years would hint strongly at it -- they would have been more effort than if they had the code to play with and often achieved lesser results.

Anyway there have been plenty of instances of fans becoming creators... and it is one of those times where phrases "like letting the inmates run the asylum". While I am told comics had a particularly bad run with this such things are not my scene (they were never a thing I or any of my friends did) I think my favourite example is probably actually quite recent, and concerns the DOTA/MOBA stuff. As the whole thing started as a mod then when it came time to developing things standalone the devs of them made the mistake of asking the fans. Long story short this is why we saw all sorts of unintuitive mechanics copied over where more sensible people might have actually sat down and thought about it before making a better game.