Ben Gonshaw: Digital Media Theorist & Game Design Consultant
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Mature Games Industry

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You can have movies of this type because anyone with an interest can go to a cinema and buy a ticket.  Similarly, anyone can walk into a bookshop to buy a novel.  This means that these products are accessible to almost anyone.  However, in order to play a game, you must first own a console or PC.  This issue is compounded because the people who buy consoles do so because they play the games that are currently available.  This results in the population with access to games remaining niche in demographic and size.

When a game is signed based on the marketing department’s sales predictions, truly mature games won’t get signed, end of story.  There are no sales figures to examine upon which to base predictions.  The market, to their statistic driven eyes, does not contain people who would play such products.  As a result, more driving games, strategies and FPS are signed, locking gaming’s appeal to a small section of the population.  That is not to say that new things haven’t been tried. In the Nineties, ‘Games for Girls’ failed primarily because the majority of people who owned consoles and PC’s for gaming were not girls.  The fact that those titles did exist was not enough to entice people to spend $200 on a console to play them on.

Until there is one truly dominant, huge penetration platform, there will not be a market big enough to warrant mature games.  Without that it is too precarious for a publisher to invest $5m in a product that will not sell enough copies to recoup the costs.  For a mature game to be made today, a developer must fund the development of that title themselves and hope that a publisher will sign the finished product and then market it properly.  With the huge costs involved this will not happen for the same risk reasons that the publishers will not fund it:  it is simply too risky.

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