The importance of good company.

Steam’s Big Picture feature is wonderful news for us. Since the day we started Tale of Tales, we’ve always imagined our games on the television screen in the living room. Until now, the game consoles have offered the only way that allows for that and we’ve had trouble getting around to develop for those.

But thanks to Steam, we might not need to. The interface works remarkably well. And the consoles better take notes on how to create a couch-friendly online store. And of course it’s great to see our games on tv.

What is less great is the context. Thanks to the firm concentration of Steam on only games, it becomes once again depressingly clear how nerdy the entire videogame context is. Browsing the offer is a smooth experience through the Big Picture interface. So smooth that there is no possible way to ignore the extreme juvenile nature, trite narratives and silly visuals abundant in the medium.

I don’t mind too much to show our work in this context myself. Makes it easy to stand out. And I do respect videogames of any kind for their craftmanship. But I worry about how this looks to outsiders. Why would anyone not familiar with games be attracted to this atmosphere? How can we hope to ever broaden the audience for videogames if most of what we show them is guns and cars and arcade bleeps?

I worry about this of course especially because with our work we hope to reach out to people who are not interested in videogames yet. Our games don’t exactly cater to the desires of the average gamer. But we think that they might appeal to people with different tastes. But why would people like that ever visit a store like this?