Why do corporate perceive gamers as idiots?

[k4far]

How do you do fellow "useful idiots". We do not need any rights since we are the products.

[Ryan]

because...a lot of gamers are useful idiots. Especially when you expand "gamer" to define anyone person that plays games, even if it's a grandmother or 5 year old playing P2W mobile farming games. Consumer ignorance has always been a powerful ally to business. Mobile games has redefined or blurred the dichotomy and have become successful experiments on how far people are willing to split with their wallet. I guess you can blame mobile gamers that do the P2W model for being the worse of all useful idiots.

[Dub-Z]

I didn't want to say it, and I'm sometimes part of the problem, but yeah... it's probably 1 out of every 1,000 gamers who can have a meaningful conversation about anything that isn't 100% mainstream, and even fewer that don't seem like sub-mainstream cliches with the same tunnel vision, hot takes, and metacritic reinforced tastes.

[isturbo1984]

Old people and old stereotypes. You basically have the older generation that are the CEOs of these companies that don't play games themselves and think we are all children. It's very, very hard to treat people you perceive as an absolute fucking retards as an hard-working adults who can think for themselves. We all do it. It's just weird that this is how the older generation thinks of us.

[Brigand Boy]

Gamers aren't a single block of people. The group includes stupid people, smart people, republicans, democrats, anarchists, physicists, doctors, garbage collectors, men, women, non-binary robots (Zenyatta, imo), and so on.

The one unifying condition of being a gamer is that you enjoy and play games (beyond just Candy Crush and Farmville). Beyond that, the full human spectrum can be involved.

So what does that mean to corporations? Because they DO seem to act like we are stupid as a group.

I think it's simple; the people they interact with the most and the people who give them the most money are whales. People who spend thousands (if not tens or hundreds of thousands) of dollars a year on lootboxes and microtransations. Imagine being in that industry and knowing that people will buy a "Red Dot" for $1. I doubt that it would be possible to maintain respect for that group of people, and as a person working behind the scenes, it may be hard (or impossible) to separate those gamers from the rest.

I mean, they encounter two major groups. One are the whales, and the other are the group of loudmouths who complain about the stuff the whales love spending money on. In a way, it's no wonder that many people in the industry are constantly making the mistake of saying that "gamers are entitled." It's a pretty stupid mistake on their part, and they are losing money because of it.

TL;DR: Yes, they think we are stupid because they think we are all the same, and that's not very smart of them.

[nerdkingcole]

Because they are. (Most of them are, anyway).

How else would the likes of Activision and EA thrive in spite of constant controversies and unethical business practices? If you look at EA's stock price, it had been steadily climbing for the past decade, even though it was voted worst company twice in a roll during that period.

For every gamer like you, there may be 10 "normies" or casual players who are their real target audience. So in a way, they aren't wrong. Their audience mostly are idiots; and there are enough of them to allow the entire industry to deteriorate and make things bad for you and I.

[zevrem]

Because just like the left wing academics we love to shit on, corporates base their whole self-image on the idea that they're smarter than anyone else. For their customer base to be able to see through their bullshit is the worst thing that can happen to them.

[MadMummy76]

Well TBBT got bad long before that. When it went from "this is what nerds are like" to "this is what other people think nerds are like"

And anyone who thinks women can't bet he butt of jokes are the misogynists.

[xadu]

Yes. The Big Bang was good when they were nerds, making self defeating jokes about their poor social skills.
But they HAD to give them girlfriends and wives. Aside that it never happens, it destroyed the point of the jokes.

Then SJW came in charging about "the sexist jokes", totally not understanding that the clumsy nerds were the butt of the jokes, not "women".

[MadMummy76]

It's not about idiots. Well it is in a manner. It's mass appeal. A typical case for this? The Big Bang Theory. It was great until it become popular and started serving what they thought the people wanted to hear instead of going for what they wanted to tell.

The only good games / tv series / books, are the ones not made to meet some perceived consumer expectation (I think they'd want this therefore I do this) but, by saying what the actual writer wants to tell. And corporate game publishers and classic tv networks are about nothing but "focus groups" trying to meet expectation instead of doing the unexpected.

[JimRaynor]

Atari collapsed once the games the best creators made stopped producing revenue. Atari undervalued the people who left and created Activision.
Atari's actions reflected the words of then CEO Ray Kassar.

[aileron]

Ummm? Just look him up in the phone book? ..... Ok that was easier than I thought it would be:
http://www.dcrane.com/Curriculum_Vitae.html

[JimRaynor]

or you could just ask David Crane yourself. it is a part of his life he loves to discuss.

[aileron]

Holy sh1t I couldn't believe that actually happened so I looked it up. It's true! Wikipedia says so

[JimRaynor]

Activision was born the day Atari's Ray Kassar said this to David Crane : "you are no more valuable to Atari than the factory workers assembling the cartridges"