I often don’t feel gamers have realistic expectations about this hobby, and this weekend, I found another shining example. Stand by for personal opinion.
I mentioned Blur on Twitter this weekend, complaining about high-level players hanging out in low-level lobbies and creaming the newbies — surely a sense of fair play would stop people from beating up on the younglings, right? Take some personal responsibilty and don’t be, as I called it, a douchebag. That led someone to comment that I shouldn’t be mocking anybody in the game’s “small, diminishing” community online — the insulting, unfounded suggestion being, you know, be thankful anybody is still playing your rapidly dying game.
Full lobby = Happy gamers
Small? Diminishing? What? Every time I log on to either 360 or PS3, there are hundreds, if not thousands, of people online, happily racing away. So I turned on my Xbox 360 right then and there, fired up Blur, and on Sunday afternoon, found 1,013 drivers in the multiplayer lobby.
For reference, the number of people do you need to play Blur online, technically, is just two. The number of people can you race with at one time in Blur is 20 (a console first), and those races are hilarious chaos. How many people were actually on at the moment of that flawed assumption? Fifty times more than you need to have the definitive Blur multiplayer experience. In fact, that’s 994 more drivers than I can even compete with in a race. I am absolutely not disappointed in that.
So when I Tweeted that number and questioned the “small” comment, I got three responses — all of which were some variation on “well, compared to Modern Warfare 2 and Halo, it’s small.”
Okay…but why are you comparing it to MW2 and Halo, since those examples are completely irrelevant? Those communities are unrelated. Compared to the critical and financial success of Titanic, The King of Kong is small — but I did not expect it to rake in billions of dollars. I did think it was a great film, and one I’ve watched more often and enjoyed more than Titanic, to be honest. Different films come with different expectations. So do people, for that matter — there’s only one Michael Jordan, and the rest of us are not lousy simply because he’s awesome.
Gamers, you cannot judge everything on one sole pinnacle example. Halo and MW2 and Gears of War are blockbusters, and different rules apply; those games have different expectations, both from the audience that play them and the people who made them. So to suggest that a game like Blur — and it could just as easily be any other game, like Hydro Thunder Hurricane or Puzzle Quest or even Steel Battalion — has an online audience that is “diminishing” because a handful of blockbuster games are more popular in pure player count, well, that’s very flawed logic at best and downright irresponsible at worst. It’s also more than a little arrogant — what, a game can’t succeed unless you play it?
I demand more players! MORE!
I’m going to invoke a mantra that a lot of gamers like to bring up: quality over quantity. When I sign in for multiplayer on any game, I just want a good time. As long as there are enough people online in Blur for me to have a satisfying race — generally 10 or 20 people, for my tastes — I don’t really care how many other people are logged on, because I’m not racing them right now. It’s great when I can choose from several lobbies, but why do I care about the people I am not racing? It’s like suggesting that you can’t have fun in a four-player game of Monopoly unless there are five or six other games going on simultaneously in the same room — that’s just stupid. When I play Blur, I want a handful of drivers looking for competition, like me. From Sunday afternoon’s quick glimpse, finding those drivers was clearly not a problem.
Still, I was curious. Before I left for work this morning — 8:30am Pacific — I fired up both the 360 and the PS3 to see how many people were playing Blur. Player count in the Xbox 360 lobbies: 773. I was expecting a lot less — I mean, Monday morning, right? So I switched over to PS3 and found…1,097. That’s even more than I found on Sunday afternoon.
Diminishing my ass.
But that’s not the point. The point is that each game has its own community with its own multiplayer expectations, and you can’t mix them up because they are different beasts entirely. As long as the game you play has enough players to meet your expectations online, nothing else matters.
