Who plays video games, really?

In your average game store, customers do not read reviews. They do not post on forums, they have never been motivated to leave Amazon feedback just to “send a message,” they do not blog. They do not know which publishers have poor reputations and which ones have good ones. They do not know the names of famous Japanese game designers; they might have Mario Kart Wii at home, but they do not know who Miyamoto is.
Leigh Alexander

Reading this felt so comforting to me. I know this. Everybody knows this. The math is simple. There are simply not millions of hardcore game fans out there. A few hundred thousand, perhaps, if even that many. But video games sell in millions of copies. Most of them to people who couldn’t care less about the discussions on this and other blogs. That is the gaming audience! That is the people we are working for. Not the clever reviewers, the whining commenters and the nagging bloggers on the internets.

This ties in neatly something we have talked a lot before but apparently have a hard time expressing properly. Maybe we should try again…