Breakthrough of a genre

• Talking about the future
• Practicality: ♥ ♥ • • •
• Theoretical: ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ •

I’ve been telling it to my colleagues for a while: Time Management – as a gaming genre – will breakthrough and reach a mainstream audience soon. However, currently the genre is hardly known by the gaming public, let alone a mainstream public. Those people that don’t view themselves as gamers at all, although they do play Candy Crush or Gardenscapes. But my gut is telling me that Time Management will become a mainstream genre within the next year or two.

I joined Blue Giraffe because they are a bunch of awesome people who have the potential to become the next PopCap. Long before I joined them, they already nailed the Time Management genre and they have been creating GameHouse‘s flagship titles for years. But it wasn’t until a few month after I started at Blue Giraffe, that the thought of Time Management breaking out of the niche started to appear in my mind.

Blue Giraffe creates a particular type of Time Management games, that not only includes silky smooth gameplay but also features a lovingly crafted story. The combination of the two is what makes our games unique and the necessity of the team to create the very best, is what is recognized by our dear fans. But these ingredients are not enough to warrant a potential breakthrough.

Currently we’re serving a niche market, which is an audience that is pretty stable, and our games are selling well. It is humbling and totally cool that we have a stable fan base that doesn’t seem to ever get enough of our games. However, it seems difficult to grow that fan base beyond the niche. So, why do I expect that it will breakthrough, even if the sales seem to suggest otherwise? Although it is a gut feeling, I’ve tried to think it through a little and I’ve broken it down into 3 main parts, gameplay, story, and market.

Gameplay
For mass audience adoption, the game has to be very easy to pick-up, with little or no explanation required. It should also be short, allowing for quick sessions in-between other activities. It should also be deep enough, so players feel they make progress. I believe our games fit the bill perfectly, but for most people it will also be a new experience, something to discover.

Story
Story could be a definite seller, especially in an era where most mass-appealing games don’t have any noteworthy story, while on the other hand story-only games or visual novels such as Episode are increasingly popular. A game that combines great gameplay and great stories may appeal to a lot of people.

People are getting increasingly aware about how they spend their time and demand that their time is spent on something meaningful. Score and basic social competition seem to lose their appeal and stories seem to become increasingly popular.

Market
I think people are always on the look-out for new experiences and I believe time management has been hiding just outside the mainstream periphery. I think this happened due to their themes. Diner Dash, Delicious, Fabulous, Heart’s Medicine, they’re all themed with women as their target audience. There’s no reason why this genre should only appeal to a female audience, as the gameplay could be adapted to any theme. And once we see more themes, both more male oriented and “everyone”-oriented, we’ll see the market expand to those audiences too. When that happens the genre will receive more press coverage, which will in turn increase the market and with a little luck it is only a matter of time that there’s a pivotal title that will dominate the market for a while, pushing the genre into the mainstream. Once there’s 1 hit title, more will follow.

Time Management as a genre is under developed compared to more well known genres, but there’s definitely a lot of potential for it to grow in different directions. I know we at Blue Giraffe are working hard to try and tap into that potential and combined with my believe that it will breakthrough makes for some very exciting times!