Our culture is deeply rooted in time management. Everything you do takes up a certain block of time. Therefore, it is natural to pivot games against other forms of entertainment. If a person is going to entertain themselves they have several choices, for instance: a book; a movie; or a video game. Because of these choices, a video game must be as marketable as that blockbuster hit.

To achieve this, a game must have a marketable core component. This is the invisible motive that gets consumers to play a game. It’s not hard to deduce what this is; however, video games surprisingly aren’t diverse enough to draw attention. In fact, the more diverse games are, by and large, the more popular they are. It seems that MMORPGs these days are similar, this is because their marketable core components are the same.

I’ve devised a list from games that I’ve played. The list goes on and on, most of them are in the same categories.

What do you think?

• EA’s SimCity Franchise : Watching Growth (Garden-like)
• Magicka : Creative Diverse Customizability
• EA’s The Sims Franchise : Watching Growth, Domination
• Active Worlds : Creative Construction
• Second Life : Immersive Chat Room
• Blizzard-Activision’s World of Warcraft : Perceived Infiniteness
• Microsoft’s Freelancer : Perceived Infiniteness
• CCP’s EVE Online : Perceived Infiniteness
• Minecraft : Deep, Perceived Geologically Complete World (Perceived Infiniteness)
• Maxis’ Sim Earth : Domination
• Microsoft’s Age of Empires, Chess, etc. : Duality Strategy

Tags: core, game, marketing