Action, Shooter, and Sports were the best-selling genres on all platforms but PC in 2014 because people crave competition and want to feel important.

Of all video game genres, people in my social network enjoy action, shooter, and sports games the most. Why are these genres so compelling to people?

Game enthusiasts gather to watch a strategy game competition.

There are lots of different genres of video games, just like there are lots of different genres of music and movies. When most people think of video games, they think of violent shooters like Call of Duty, but there are other genres of games out there: action, fighting, simulation, sports, and role-playing to name a few. Like in music and movies, different genres of video games sell more than others. The top three best-selling ones are action, shooter, and sports.

To see why, I sent a bunch of people on my social network a survey to see what their favorite genres were. I wanted to see whether action, shooter, and sports were also people’s favorites.  I got 59 responses, and the top three genres overall were indeed sports, action, and shooter.

I want to explore why these genres of video games have the highest sales, what makes them so compelling and enduring across major platforms, and why studios will continue to invest heavily in them. The one big exception to this finding is on the PC platform, where strategy, casual, and role-playing games dominate.

The Entertainment Software Association, a market research organization, found that 71% of all video game players are 18 years old or older. What is it about action, shooters, and sports games that make them so appealing to this wide demographic?

The action, shooter, and sports genres appeal to the part of the brain that craves competition, rewards, and the need to feel important to others. 

I posed this question to people on the street. They all have different answers, but those answers boil down to two core concepts: competitiveness and thrill. In other words, people over the age of 18 enjoy these genres because they all offer rewarding competitive experiences with other people.

I want to clarify that when I refer to an “action” game, I’m specifically talking about a type of game in which you control your character on screen that can perform offensive or defensive moves to overcome obstacles in the game and occasionally solve puzzles. This is different from shooters, in which the primary objective is shooting things. Both of these genres are inherently violent.

According to GamesIndustry.biz, a news and information site that covers the games industry, there’s in fact a psychological reason people gravitate towards this violence.

First of all, people want to feel competent. They want to feel as if there is some real challenge that they have been given and that, through perseverance and skill, they will be rewarded for the time they sank into overcoming the challenge.

Blood as a reward for fighting well

In action and shooter games, there are long-term and more immediate rewards. The immediate rewards give the player feedback as to how well the player performed by showing enemies stagger as they get hit or by showing larger sprays of blood for better hits, for example.

Longer-term rewards make the player feel more powerful by offering them a greater variety of increasingly powerful weapons, armor, and tools. A good action or shooter game will also increase the difficulty of the challenges to keep the player coming back for more.

A character creator in a shooter

Secondly, people want to feel like they have autonomy in the game world. Many action and shooter games give players the option to choose what weapons or team members they will take into battle and how they will approach a particular scenario. Some action games even let the player customize how their character looks on screen. All of these choices invest the player more in the game and make their play-through of the game seem unique and personal to them.

Finally, people want to feel like their actions are important in the game world. Most shooters and action games have stories that revolve around your character. Well-written games will make the player’s actions seem important to the other central characters in the game (by saving them, protecting them, helping them when they’re in need, etc.).

Shooters especially shine in this regard in online multiplayer matches. In many shooters, players are able to form teams with other players and try to beat the other team at some objective (like killing members of the other team the most times, capturing the most flags, protecting a special area in the environment, etc.). Players feel like they’re part of a team and making significant contributions to the team’s victory, much like in sports.

But on PC, these genres aren’t the best selling. What’s different about the PC that makes role-playing, casual, and strategy games much more successful on that platform?

The most popular genres on PC are different because the controller for the games is different and because developers don't stop making games for it.

Again, I posed the question to people on the street. In general, they think that the input method (i.e. the mouse and keyboard) lends itself better to role-playing and strategy games more than a standard controller on a console does.

Having played some of these strategy and role-playing games, I’m inclined to agree. These games demand precise mouse movements, and fast button presses on the mouse and keyboard. They also tend to use most of the keys on the keyboard, each of which acts as a shortcut for some frequently used command. Since there are so many buttons to press to play the game effectively, playing on a standard console controller is not preferred.

Since many of these games only receive PC versions as a result, and because game development never stops on PC like it does on consoles (no games are developed for the Playstation 2 anymore, for example), many online role-playing and strategy games have tight-knit, long-standing communities built around them.

World of Warcraft subscribers over time.

When expansions or sequels to these beloved games release, many within the community will want to buy them to keep up with the game and their friends. World of WarCraft, for instance, has seen its subscriber counts jump significantly every time an expansion is released for it. StarCraft, a strategy game, became a nationally televised sport in South Korea in 2002 and is still going strong today.

Technology drives what sorts of software and games are possible on those platforms. In turn, that software drives what becomes popular. With several new technologies on the horizon like virtual reality and wearable technology, there will come new and different ways of interacting with games. I’m excited to see what new genres these technologies will make possible, and I look forward to seeing what genres thrive on those platforms.

Interactive visualization of Netflix stock is difficult to understand

I found an interactive visualization of data associated with Netflix stock on Yahoo Finance. This visualization contains a lot of information, and, in my opinion, is difficult to interpret. First of all, the visualization has two separate plots that measure two separate things on the same set of axes. One of them is a line plot that shows trends in stock price. This plot is relatively simple to interpret, provided you know that the stock price is measured in dollars (the chart doesn't indicate this).  The other is a bar plot that shows volume of stocks sold, and it really shouldn't share the same vertical axis as the first plot considering volume here is measured in number of shares (which goes into the millions). The bars in the plot are colored either red or green, but there is no indication as to what the colors mean, as there is no legend anywhere. There is a lot of interactivity here, though. You can compare trend lines with other stocks, change the time scale, and move your cursor across the line plot to see statistics associated with that point in the line. For people who know a lot about stocks and related statistics, this might well be a simple chart to use and understand. For others, it's much less simple.

Researchers at Murdoch University Find Interactive Advertising is as Effective as Passive Advertising

• Advergames (short for advertisement-games) are as effective as passive ads despite their interactivity
• Most advergames are too shallow to allow for long-lasting player engagement
• Virtual reality and other new technologies could boost novelty of advergames

There's been a notion that, because video games are more interactive than a medium like TV, any message a game pushes on the player is somehow more effective than a message pushed onto the average television viewer. Media researchers at Murdoch University in Australia had the same idea, and set out to test their theory in the context of advertising. What they found was that TV advertisements were just as effective as interactive commercials that featured advergames (short for advertisement-games) or standalone advergames.

An M&M's advergame

Overview of the study

Participants in the study were split up into three groups, one that would watch TV advertisements, one that would play advergames, and one that would watch interactive advertisements that would prompt them to play an advergame. The researchers measured effectiveness through four qualifiers:

• "Brand attitude," which was how the participants felt about the product being advertised and how convinced they were about that perception
• "Product involvement," which measured how much the product stood out to participants in the advertisement
• "Telepresence," which measured how much the participant felt they had been transported to the world of the advertisement
• "Proven day-after recall," which measured whether participants remembered the advertisement the day after they had seen it. 

 While the type of advertisement (and the age of the participant, surprisingly) was found to not affect effectiveness, product involvement and brand attitude were.

Advergame vs. Game with in-game ads

In-game advertising in Shaun White Skateboarding

It's important to note the difference between an advergame and a video game with advertising in it. Advergames exist for the sole purpose of advertising a product or service. It might make  use of recognizable characters related to the product (like the fish from Goldfish ads or the Gecko from GEICO ads) to make a consumer check the game out. On the other hand, there are games that use brand-name products to make its world and characters more relatable. After all, what's a sports broadcast without advertising?

Advergames are interactive, so why aren't they more effective than TV ads?

It's tough to make any generalizations as to how effective video games' messages can be. I want to emphasize that not all games have the same effect on people. While games can be highly engaging because of their interactivity and the player is more likely to pay attention to any messages the game has to offer because of that, basic interactivity isn't necessarily enough to grab a player's attention. Many advergames, like the one shown above, are shallow board games or quizzes and don't immerse the player in the world of the ad. These types of games are cheap and easy to build and embed into browsers, and they load quickly. They certainly don't resemble the sort of addictive, immersive, story-driven games that some media outlets and the National Rifle Association point at to blame for the latest shooting in a public place. Would these games be more effective with a bigger budget and a more engaging world? Would the greater cost spent developing a more engaging game translate into more product sales? That remains to be seen. The researchers say that it's going to be a challenge for advertisers to develop a game simple enough to appeal to a large audience that's also deep enough to be engaging. Some more focus testing would be needed.

M&M's ad from Super Bowl 2014

Let's take a look at the M&M's Super Bowl 2014 TV spot to see how it was more effective than the advergame shown above. First of all, it had the advantage of being a Super Bowl commercial. Super Bowl commercials are watched by millions of people since the Super Bowl has a reputation for having memorable commercials accompanying it. Telepresence is bigger too, since the Super Bowl is often watched on a large screen, and according to the study, telepresence tends to increase with screen size. It has elements of humor and involves real people in the advertisement, making it more relatable to viewers, and tells them that M&M's are tasty on a bowl of ice cream. In contrast, the advergame above is the game reversi with an M&M's aesthetic. It relies on the consumer's previous knowledge of the brand to coerce them into play the game. It's not something likely to be remembered the next day. It doesn't help advertisers that ad blocking browser extensions exist, effectively preventing the consumer from ever seeing what the advertisers have to say. What are advertisers, desperate for innovation, to do?

Advergames moving forward

Just because advergames don't seem to do better than passive advertisements despite its interactivity doesn't mean the medium can't improve. Emerging technologies like virtual and augmented reality could do wonders for advergames. Journalists who tried Oculus Rift virtual reality headsets reported feeling much more immersed in the experience regardless of what was being shown to them. Maybe the depth perception virtual reality will bring to advergames will be enough to make them more interesting than the ads we see on the internet today.

Until technology allows advertisers to explore new ways to engage consumers, advergames will continue to only be as effective as a passive ad. With new, more immersive technologies on the horizon, the coming decade will be an interesting one for advertisers.

A Brief Bio

Hello there, reader!

My name is Krishna, creator of this blog. I am currently pursuing a degree in computer science and am hoping to graduate in December. I have also taken several courses in physics, just because I think the subject is cool.

My short term goal is to get an internship over the summer and a job after I graduate, working as a programmer or as a consultant in the tech industry. Then it's off to business school to get an MBA in finance to maybe break into the financial analysis market. The details of how I'll accomplish that are up in the air for now, though.

Outside of academics, I love consumer electronics and keeping up with the trade shows that surround them before they're available to the public. I like watching as prototypes and tech demos get more and more refined every time we see them, and I like watching how the marketing changes with a product as it becomes more clear what the scope of the product's functionality will be. More than any other piece of consumer electronics, I follow video games and love talking about them and that industry. This is because I feel the video game industry offers so many facets to follow. You could choose to follow development and related art and technologies, or you could follow publishers and their business-side antics, or how games are covered by the media (both mainstream and game-centric), and a lot more. Plus you get to play video games once they release!

I hope this post gave you a nibble of insight into who I am and what I do.