Gamasutra has an interesting article stating that gaming today is actually going to be a, and maybe already is, a niche market.  There are strong trends indicating that games today are not what people want, and what we consider the “main stream” is really just a niche market.  Below is a quote from the article by Brandon Sheffield:

 Interestingly, never has the film/game analogy worked less well than it does currently. In the PS2 era, you could correlate Grand Theft Auto III with a movie blockbuster, and Ico with an art-house film.

But now, in terms of scope, money, and global social impact, Kart Rider or Club Penguin would be that blockbuster, and Call of Duty 4 would be the art-house equivalent, though content- and budget-wise Call of Duty 4 is much more your traditional blockbuster material. Something seems awry there.

I agree with Sheffield that the current market is niche and every day it is becoming more niche with the way the games industry is going.  I really need to believe that there is something more in this industry than what it is currently outputting.  Even some of the industry’s most heralded games for innovation such as Spore, have a feeling of being very niche games.  I mean, what percentage of the population actually want to deal with evolution?  I mean, everyone learns it in school, but how many people actually become evolutionary biologists?  I know it’s an extreme example, but why are we making games that are hard to identify with on a personal level?

If we can look at the movie industry, games fall into a small genre of the scope of movies.  Where are our romance games?  Where are our comedies?  Where are our tragedies?  All games today cover are that small part of the spectrum we call action… will it ever be able to climb out of this niche position?  We will have to wait and see.  From my viewpoint, even though Sheffield states that it needs to be a social experience, I don’t think the mainstream needs to be social in the context of a game itself.  Is a movie really social?  Is a book really social?  The answer can be “yes” only if you take into account socializing that is external to the medium.  People talk about the movie or the book after watching or reading it… but it is not inherent to the medium to be social.  Games have the ability to be social within the medium, but it doesn’t necessarily have to be social only in the medium.