The miniscule modern audience
The face of the games industry has changed a lot since about 2008-ish. When gaming started to go mainstream, you had a lot of people flood into the industry who weren’t gamers. All of whom were either chasing the golden goose or looking to shift the culture away from its perceived dude-bro aesthetic. The latter of whom argued that there was this massive, untapped new audience for video games. Young people who were progressive, cared about social justice issues, and wanted more diversity in gaming. Over a decade on, we now have the numbers, and things aren’t looking so good for this so called “modern audience.”
Over the past year, we’ve seen a number of explicitly woke games coming out. Concord, Zau, Dustborn, etc, as well as the rise of consulting firms like Sweet Baby Inc. DEI has been heavily baked into the corporate culture of many game companies, so that most major Western games, and an increasing number of Japanese ones, have begun incorporating more of the ideology into their products. For the longest time, games journalists argued these games were actually performing quite well, and it was the old school “CHUD” gamers who were in the firm minority. And we didn’t really have good numbers on how well these games were doing. Especially since console platform holders don’t publish player counts or digital sales. Well, all except for Steam.
As part of their API, Valve makes player counts available for their entire library, which are publicly available on third-party sites like SteamDB. While active player counts aren’t always the best method for determining a game’s overall market health, especially for single player titles, they can still give us some valuable insight.
Take Black Myth: Wukong for example. A game which journalists have tried to paint in a negative light due to its alleged lack of diversity. It hit a peak player count of 2,415,714, beating the previous record set by Palworld earlier in the year. Journalists have claimed it’s mainly Chinese players, but even in the troughs, they’re are still pulling in a couple hundred thousand, with it being the top most played game in all markets at the time of writing. Black Myth is a fairly traditional hack and slash that ships complete in box, and lacks microtransactions or season passes. Furthermore, it doesn’t incorporate DEI ideology. In fact the studio explicitly forbid journalists from mentioning things like feminism in their reviews, saying they wanted them to focus on the gameplay.
Meanwhile, Sony’s new looter-shooter Concord only managed to pull in a peak of 2,388 players during its free public beta last month. Dustborn meanwhile, which has been characterized as extremely woke by online commentators, only pulled in a measly 83 players at launch, and dropping. Other DEI games have shown similar stats. In fact out of Steam’s current most played games, there’s not a single woke title. There’s a couple borderline ones, sure, but none that are explicitly so. Of those, they tend to be part of long running franchises.
Thing is games are very expensive and time consuming to make. Concord reportedly took 8 years to develop. Even smaller titles like Dustborn don’t come cheap. A lot of these consultation firms like SBI also charge developers in the millions for their services. Yet games that are explicitly designed for the “modern audience”, even the most “popular” ones, are barely pulling in enough players to fill a small town hockey arena. While we don’t have numbers for consoles, we can’t expect them to be great either. Otherwise journalists would be publishing them to tout their success. So given all the evidence we have, we can conclude what many of us have suspected all along; the “modern audience” simply doesn’t exist.
See, while the face of the industry has changed considerably, gamers themselves really haven’t. There’s a huge disconnect between what the customer wants versus what studios are willing to produce. Of course there are a few exceptions. Nintendo still produces games using the same design philosophy they’ve had for over four decades now. South Korean and Chinese studios also intimately understand the gamer brain, especially male gamers. This is why journalists and Western developers are just seething right now over Black Myth. It’s a definitively 2000s-style game that has been updated with modern technology and QoL features. Despite over a decade of trying to force change in the community, activists in the industry have failed, utterly and completely. While nobody in mainstream media likes to acknowledge it, this is a big reason behind the recent mass layoffs and studio closures. “Owning the CHUDs” just isn’t a viable business strategy.
Photo by Pavel Danilyuk, via Pexels
