Shattering paradigms

Answering to Amberyl in the form of a new post:

There’s a niche in the market for the super hardcore, undoubtedly. I’m just not convinced that there are 500,000 super-hardcore players who want to play Vanguard specifically (as opposed to, let’s say, EVE and whatever other games come along targeting that market).


The problem of the “hardcore” target is inconsistent.

If Vanguard aims to the current hardcore players it will simply fail. Without a doubt. Statistical data is useless when you start a new project. New games TRANSFORM the players and create their own audience. They make the rules change completely. They CRUSH expectations and implicit rules. They create new paradigms going against all reasonable premises. They don’t behave as we expect. They don’t follow the same patterns we already traced.

All the guesswork done by industry analysts is bullshit. It’s just a temporary theory with no foundation that will systematically crumble as a castle of cards. They just play on the back of a whale till the next wave wipes them off. Short-lived as all the premises on which this whole industry is built. Arbitrary, unfounded assumptions. Hoping to be right when they intimately know it’s all bullshit. And yet they fool themselves.

So, imho, the goal of Vanguard is not to create a game for a niche. Buy ferrying new and former players to that paricular style that the game is going to promote. Whatever it will be. Pretty much what WoW is doing right now.

Casuals and Hardcore are myths. They are completely inconsistent, vaporous. This fracture didn’t exist on past data. It was CREATED.

WoW made it more glaring and critical because they opposed one part to the other. They made it emerge. They built a barrier and two different styles one going against the other. This is not something that the game suffered passively. This is something that the game TRIGGERED. Purposely.

All the statistical data coming from the current games is bullshit. It serves no purpose if not creating commonplaces with no consistence. You cannot see the current trends because what determines these trends are not the trends themselves, but what brought to them: the games.

New games can create new trends, new public and they can completely overthrow the situation as we know it.

This is why Vanguard’s goal isn’t about wagering at the current hardcore players, but creating its own space and value. Converting both current and potential players to its own way. Attracting those players as a magnet. Transforming them. Building its own audience in its own way. Opening a door that wasn’t there before.

The current trends mean jack shit. What matters is solely the concrete value of the game and if it is enough to attract the players.

You win your public not if you meet their expectations. You win the public if you convince them with something or better or different.

Successful games IMPOSE their paradigms, they create trends. They enter the field without asking “please”. They create a public out of empty air as it happened, unexpectedly, for WoW.

This is why we speak of innovation. Because it’s the key that reveals how our convictions hold no truth.

Which is what pretty much everyone is saying (and penguins, and all that stuff). With the difference that I don’t believe that the innovation needs to come through brand new genres.

Our “fantasy”, silly games have still A WHOLE LOT to say. If you allow them.

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