There’s an interesting think piece on Medium that tackles misconceptions when it comes to trying to pigeonhole players and games into categories. The crux of the argument is that these separations are often too vague and the average gamer only plays a very small handful of games.
According to the article, only 1.3 million gamers on Steam are purchasing and trying out several titles per year, which is only 1% of the market on that platform. “If you’re developing a downloadable game for Steam you’re not even fighting for 135M of its active users, you’re fighting for the attention of 1.3 million gamers that are actually buying lots of games,” the author writes.
He also notes that World of Warcraft didn’t actually expand the MMO market, but instead it created a World of Warcraft market unto itself that didn’t help out the larger industry. “I think when you start thinking in terms of audiences for individual games instead of broad vague ‘MMORPG crowd,’ ‘MOBA crowd’ you’ll start to realize that sometimes a huge success of one big title doesn’t mean much for everyone else. It doesn’t expand existing market or destroy it, it creates a new one.”
