IndustryGamers - Informing the Games Industry

PS3's Heavy Rain: The FarmVille of Core Games

Posted April 8, 2011 by David Radd

The AAA-gaming industry is beset with problems right now... well one problem really: making money. Namely, it takes a lot of money to make any AAA-game worth its salt, between all the developers needed to construct it and budget needed for marketing to let people know your game exists. The number of true top-of-the-line titles in the industry has shrunk drastically over the past decade as the potential profit for making them has simply evaporated.

The basic reason for this (along with geometrically increasing development costs) is the fact that the core gamer population isn't growing very much. Generally, the target audience is a male (probably white) between their teenage years and 34 years old. That's a very engaged and prolific spending demographic, but it's still only a fraction of the overall population, and even though core gamers are steady spenders, most are going to drop $60 on a game but so many times a year.

It's one of the reasons (among others) that many developers that have worked on expensive, AAA titles have shifted their priorities to smaller companies with games for smartphones, Facebook and the web. The overhead is a whole lot less, the channels for getting the product to consumers are much less complicated and they reach a much larger audience than current generation consoles can manage (millions vs. hundreds of millions). Smaller games are also a respite from the “committee driven” development of AAA titles that so often leads to “safe” games.

Now, not all consoles are owned by the above detailed demographic, and even if they are, many undoubtedly share residence with parents/wives/girlfriends/sisters that probably don't play games. Most gamers have probably dealt with this in the past from non-gaming housemates whose attitudes might run from apathy to thinly veiled contempt. The industry must regard these individuals as untapped potential, however.

For many of these sorts of non-gamers, their latest interaction with games might be something like Wii Sports or Rock Band. There's nothing wrong with that, but those types of experiences are often what I term as a “board game” like experience – you take it out and play it with friends, but it's disposable and not something you play a lot on your own. For AAA developers, it's hard to take lessons from those games and apply that success to their own games because their approach and appeal is so different from their own.

There is one AAA game that has come out in the past year that developers should really take note of, however: Heavy Rain. A lot of pretentious descriptions have been thrown around about Heavy Rain, not the least of which came from creator David Cage who said it “is not a video game anymore in my mind.” Fundamentally, it's still a video game with most of the important moments of the game decided by your skill in quick-time events (QTEs), whatever else anyone may claim. That is not the important lesson to be taken from the game, however.

Despite critical acclaim and a score-aggregate average around 90 percent, Heavy Rain is a very divisive game. Some said it had a plot of a Lifetime movie, others thought the QTE driven actions were too simplistic and still others said the game was slow and boring. A lot of those same elements of Heavy Rain that didn't click with certain hardcore gamers, however, could be used to draw in a larger mainstream audience. Here are five reasons why:

It's not about combat – So many core games are driven by strife of some sort – it's all innocuous enough, but I can understand how fighting and shooting constantly doesn't do it for some people. Even for me, I've felt a little numb after a couple of prolonged sessions of shooting virtual soldiers. By contrast, Heavy Rain seems to revel in the mundane – the entire introductory sequence that serves as a tutorial has you shaving, setting out plates at the dinner table and playing with your kids. The whole game isn't so placid – there are several action sequences, but those are driven by QTEs. The methodical pacing and (generally) simple controls are something that could appeal to a wider audience; it could have even been simplified a bit more if it used fewer of the buttons on the DualShock 3.

Relatable cast – The ensemble cast of Heavy Rain feels much more personable than most games. I'm not quite sure why it feels this way more than most other games, but it probably has a lot to do with the fact that the actors more or less appear exactly the same as their digital counterparts without many changes, which typically isn't the case. With the exception of Madison Page (whose likeness and body motion capture were provided by English model Jacqui Ainsley) the people that fill the town look and seem like someone you might meet on the street. Some of the more villainous personalities get a bit cartoon-ish, but the main characters (a father, a photojournalist, an FBI agent and a P.I.) are pretty human, and their foibles very tangible. This is tremendously rare in games, where most characters seem larger than life, and is a definite point in Heavy Rain's favor in appealing to a large demographic.

Grounded setting – This generation has seen a new peak in “realistic” games... and what most games define realism as is “gritty, brown-colored war simulator.” While things have never looked better graphically, most games still don't feel much like the real world. In most AAA games, you end up destroying/killing/excising dozens of robots/humans/demons and the effect is very unlike what most humans would experience. By contrast in Heavy Rain, killing one person is given tangible weight, characters do not feel nigh invulnerable and there's one particular trial Ethan Mars went through that left me feeling like there was a hole in my stomach. Calling something “realistic” seems disingenuous for a series of rather fantastic events happening around four people over the course of a few days trying to track down a serial killer, but there's a certain level of grounded-ness to the characters and setting lacking in most games. And for all the non-gamers who like to deal with situations in a way they can relate to, it's an important element.

Character driven story – I'm not going to pretend that there aren't many character driven stories in games. This generation has driven story-telling in games like never before, and it's usually about the virtual avatar the players inhabit. However, the games often come down to experiencing a story or living a fantasy that's a sort of “wish-fulfillment” for the prime male demographic. What Heavy Rain has (and this ties into the cast and the setting) is a main character who is a father dealing with the death of his son and facing the reality of his other son being murdered. It's not very “sexy” but it's the sort of situation that any parent can relate to. The pain of Ethan Mars is the sort that many non-gamers could genuinely empathize with, which doesn't usually happen in games with bombastic settings and larger-than-life characters.

Crime mystery thriller – If you look at TV shows, the appeal of cop dramas is quite high. It's not something I can honestly get excited about myself – most cop/lawyer shows, from Law & Order and CSI to NYPD Blue and NCIS, all sort of run together in my mind. There's no doubting their popularity though – just look at how many there have been on both sides of the Atlantic. Murder mystery stories (a related sub-genre) also remain popular; elements of both are in Heavy Rain. This genre of popular fiction is almost completely absent from AAA-games and there are plenty of non-gamers (and quite a few women) who enjoy a good 'whodunit.'

I didn't write this article because I hate the structure and tone of most modern games; on the contrary, I like sophomoric power romps as much as the next gamer (see my op-ed on Bayonetta) but I enjoy variety too. I also didn't write this because I want developers to copy the Heavy Rain formula in a completely rote fashion – there are individually elements that are worth considering on their own in order to appeal to both core gamers and the larger demographic of non-gamers. I agree with Cliff Bleszinski that Heavy Rain didn't do enough to appeal to the larger demographic that I wrote about in this piece, but that doesn't mean that future games will make that same mistake.

If David Cage is right and developers have gotten sick of space marines, now is the time to try and take that risk with a different sort of AAA game. If handled the right way, a new genre could be formed and give a wider appeal to core games than was once thought possible. Hopefully, gamers will still get the games they like and publishers will get more money from the new titles – everyone wins, right?

David Radd has worked as a gaming journalist since 2004 at sites such as GamerFeed, Gigex and GameDaily Biz.