We here at OUYA would like to provide gamers and developers with better genre names to describe your games, and to help people find them. Please use this thread to tell me what genre names you think are missing, what are brand new ones you wish existed, how you think the names should be changed, etc. Now that you're going through the process, and, hopefully, seeing the DISCOVER section on your OUYAs populated more and more by the hour, you'll get a sense of what might work better for you all!
I know I am...... :)
Comments
The genre I found very missing when I was submitting my game was "Adventure". My game is an action-adventure, but the only genres available that fit were "Action" and "RPG" (but my game isn't an RPG, and it's much more of an adventure game than an action game). And I know of at least one pure Adventure game coming as a launch title, Whispering Willows.
As for the Discover section, we don't have access to that yet, it still says the store is coming.
Adventure
Arcade/Pinball
Cards/Casino
Collections
Dual-Stick Shooter
Fight!
FPS/Shooter
Hack n’ Slash
Meditative
Platformers
Play w/Friends
Puzzles & Trivia
Racing
Retro
Role-Playing Game
Short on Time?
Sims/Strategy
Take the category "Simulation". Chances are, someone who drives trucks for a living might download "Truck Simulator", but has no interest in "Train Simulator"
On the flip side, gamers have been conditioned to think in terms of "FPS, RPG, RTS etc", and some people don't really care for the "theme" of the game. They just want to command armies in real time, whether it's the legions of Rome Total War, or the Swarm of Starcraft. Mr Truck Driver knows exactly what category he'll find his Truck Simulator game in.
Equally, put a Mass Effect player into Skyrim and they might start asking "where are the lasers?"
Some people even consider the practice of dividing things up into genres to be holding back creativity, as people demand that games fit with the existing genre conventions.
There is also the problem of where to put games that don't obviously fit into any one of the existing categories. Where would I put a board game? Sims/Strategy or Play with Friends? It certainly isn't a Party game. Knowing my customers, I might chose to put it in the RPG category to get maximum sales, even though it clearly isn't an RPG.
If this happens, fans of RPG's will start complaining that the category is full of non-RPG's, and the whole thing starts to break down
To add to it all, it seems there is a 3rd way of divvying up the genres, which is by time/depth. Does a game take 5 minutes or 5 days? How easy is it to jump in and out? Arguably, Counterstrike is a casual game, because you can jump straight in with minimal thought/effort/setup and play in short, 5 minute maximum rounds. It's also a social game, as people chat and spectate together once they are dead. However, try telling hardcore CS clans in semi-professional leagues that their game is "Social/Casual"
I think this is why valve floated the idea of community created and curated stores within the larger Steam platform. So that fans of RTS games could create a collection of all their favourite RTS titles, whilst WWII fans could stick Company of Heroes next to IL-2 Sturmovik in their "shop"
However, that is a long term solution that requires implementing all sorts of stuff from a technical perspective, rather than just shuffling around the existing genres as they are in the current system. Likewise with tag clouds or user-recommended or recommended by some algorithm that looks at your tastes and likes/dislikes
In the near term, from a practical point of view, those genres are probably fine. Some things, like Racing, are a genre and a mechanic. Other things like gambling probably deserve their own category, because mixing them up into all sorts of other genres could be dangerous or cause distrust in the system (users asking themselves "Is this game suddenly going to turn into a gambling game?")
I think the only other danger is that it doesn't look good for some of them to be empty or sparsely populated. If my game is the only one in the "Board Game" genre, it gets a higher profile than the 1000 odd games in the Arcade. Even though less people are interested in Board Games, at some point, curiosity will make people poke their heads into the other genres to just see what is around
Website
"Board Game" is needed. For my game anyway!
Ed
I'm pretty sure that's exactly how it works. When submitting a game you can already choose multple genres, and then there's a section for adding tags. And I read or heard somewhere that eventually end users will be able to add their own tags to games.
As for hack n slash and fight, a fighting game is generally a tournament-like contest between 1 to 4 players (Street Fighter, Super Smash Bros, Soul Caliber), while a hack & slash game is a linear game where one or more characters move level by level through a scrolling world beating up hordes of enemies (Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Final Fight, Golden Axe).
> Anti piracy measures are needed and it doesn't haves to interfer with the concept of open console
If I'm getting together with some friends we're going to want to only look for 4 player games...