Would you call yourself a gamer?
Let’s build a stereotype here. You own either a “hardcore” game console or a PC that you would play games with Steam, that means you have a PS4 or Xbox One, the Switch could be too soft-core to your taste and it isn’t fair to count that PS5 you never get to buy. Historically 117.2 million PS4s and 58.5 million Xbox Ones were sold, Steam has 132 million monthly active users. Assuming we are so loyal to our gaming platforms that there are no overlaps here, that makes a whopping 307.7 million of us.
This is why we often fail to realize we are not really the majority.
I am not talking about “video games lead to violence” bs here, quite the opposite. We haven’t been paying attention to the mass adoption of games, because we assumed games have to be at least 20 hours long, next gen graphics, lots of problem solving or skill training. Those games that are not “game” enough, too easy to win, too boring and cartoonish, more social elements than actual grinding, we’ve filtered them.
99% of us don’t know Bejeweled has sold more than 100 million copies, Candy Crush Saga’s MAU is 200 - 300 million, Pokemon GO peaked at 232 million and still holds 78 million MAU today. Do you hate hypercasual games with loads of ads and low quality assets? We are talking about 15.6 billion downloads in 2021, that’s 50 times more than the numbers of “gamers” we have mentioned, divide that number by 5 or 10 to reflect games per head if you like, but you get the idea.
We won’t understand what makes games fun to the people who plays them if we don’t even see these people in the first place. We don’t realize there are so many gameplays out there simply not designed for narrowly defined gamers and we can always choose to leave people who enjoys them alone. I’ve met some top 0.1% whales in gacha mobile games confessed that the process of tapping the spin button to fill up their collection is exactly the gameplay he’s looking for. Whether this hurts other players game experience or not depends on game design, not the whale’s behavior itself. There are always guild members in SLGs having zero idea on how to form a team or optimize build orders even after months of playing. They enjoy getting commands from guild leaders, hanging out in chats, checking in every few hours to collect resources and earning some minor progress everyday.
These are all players, by definition, people who play games. What’s behind the term “gamers”, is the denial of games that aren’t fitting into stereotypes, an arrogant self-proclaimed smart minority worried about getting dethroned.
I’m old enough to remember single-player gamers saying MMOs are brainless grind-to-wins (won’t deny that back then), then free-to-play turning pay-to-win is unfair, PC gamers saying mobile games are not games because they are too simple. But people won’t recall raids with strategies taking over number games, whale balancing issues were either taken care of in many multiplayer games or doesn’t exist as mobile games shifting back to mainly single player again. And trust me, people would still scream “blockchain game is a scam” even when there are so many new ones striving to eliminate speculation, already ditched unaffordable NFTs or ponzi play-to-earn slogans. Value preservation of game assets not hosted by game companies and readable by multiple apps will form new game design patterns, hence creating new player behaviors.
Games adapt to platforms, where use behavior decides gameplay. Remember, not every game is meant for you.