It’s all teens and girls in too short skirts out to save the world with MASSIVE MELODRAMA!!! (cue closeups of all characters looking shocked and screaming like idiots). And we all kinda out-grew that.
So, setting aside the whole question of whether they’re making good games today, or whether their theming is a good idea, I think that you’ve got a point that with brands, you tend to sell a demographic on it, and maybe it’s better to track the demographic that already likes your brand than to switch to another. I don’t know if there’s a term for that in branding.
Like, the original three Star Wars movies were aimed at a demographic that was…maybe teen and up? And by the time the later Star Wars movies came out, they were a lot older. When The Phantom Menace came out, it had a fair bit of material to appeal to kids. A lot of people who liked the original movies weren’t happy with the movie, because it was shifting focus away from them as a target demographic. George Lucas said that he wanted to make something that his grandchildren would want to watch. Which…okay, that’s fine, but there’s also inevitably a tradeoff to make, in that content closely-tailored for one demographic can’t be as closely-tailored to another.
I think that that’s also some of what created friction around Fallout 76. The series built a large base of fans who enjoyed playing a single-player game. Shifting them to a multiplayer game just didn’t necessarily make a lot of sense from a brand management strategy.
So, setting aside the whole question of whether they’re making good games today, or whether their theming is a good idea, I think that you’ve got a point that with brands, you tend to sell a demographic on it, and maybe it’s better to track the demographic that already likes your brand than to switch to another. I don’t know if there’s a term for that in branding.
Like, the original three Star Wars movies were aimed at a demographic that was…maybe teen and up? And by the time the later Star Wars movies came out, they were a lot older. When The Phantom Menace came out, it had a fair bit of material to appeal to kids. A lot of people who liked the original movies weren’t happy with the movie, because it was shifting focus away from them as a target demographic. George Lucas said that he wanted to make something that his grandchildren would want to watch. Which…okay, that’s fine, but there’s also inevitably a tradeoff to make, in that content closely-tailored for one demographic can’t be as closely-tailored to another.
I think that that’s also some of what created friction around Fallout 76. The series built a large base of fans who enjoyed playing a single-player game. Shifting them to a multiplayer game just didn’t necessarily make a lot of sense from a brand management strategy.