Big sellers for 2008

This list of the top selling games for 2008 did the rounds at work the other day, which provided some interesting discussion points, as will the follow up analysis. It's the usual depressing list of mediocre film tie-ins, licensed IPs and sequels! Who keeps buying the film games? Shrek! Transformers 3! Spiderman 3! I shudder. Maybe there out to be a law about grandparents buying games for presents.

Though as an aside, I overheard a very interesting conversation a couple of months ago between two people of grandparently age who were buying DS games for themselves, and talking about the games that they enjoyed playing with their grandkids. The times they are a-changing.

Interesting that Assassin's Creed did so well. I don't know why, but I just got the impression that it had kind of flopped.

The other thing that struck me about the list is the games that we don't talk about. There are a lot of games tucked away on that list that would have been would have had a very different development process to make (by which I mean - get this out the door quickly and we don't care what it looks like!), but have done quite well.

• Any of the High School Musical games.
• Hannah Montana
• Imagine Fashion Designer

Spot the connection! I know that talking about the 'girl' market has been done to death, but when you look at the 'quality' of the products offered, it's just astounding. The games are just vomited into the market place, safe in the realisation that their basic IP will override any flaws in their game design.

I've just encountered another example of this today. We're looking at horse-riding at the moment, and got a few of the 'targeted at the tween girl' horsey games.

There were three of us in howls of laughter at how bad the controls were. It was incredible that any game could ship with something that unplayable. Though I think it's the usual explanation: the developers would have become quite accustomed to using them as the controls and game were developed incrementally, without any outside feedback.

The same thing happened to me once when I was the QA test lead on a certain project. To us, the game was ridiculously easy, and we could finish the entire game in under an hour. But new players struggled to get out of the first room. The problem was that we new exactly where each creature was going to spawn into the game world, so they were all killed before they had a chance to fire at the player. If you didn't know where they were going to appear, you found yourself being shot at by a dozen enemies that were all around you, resulting in a deadly crossfire.

I've been a firm believer in rigourous focus testing ever since!

I suppose that this is all relates to this discussion here on gamasutra.com: Why do good people make bad games. It's a risk averse industry that is happy to take the easy money by making a cheaper product that has a guaranteed return, knowing that spending more money to make a better, or more polished game will not significantly increase sales. But the big downside to this is that there are certain markets, such as the teen/pre-teen girl market that just get crap foisted on them that the prestigious titles for the prestigious markets don't get. Sure there are crap shooters, and crap roleplaying games, but there isn't a AAA fashion game!