To be fair, they're pretty hard to explain.
Raphael Colantonio has been making immersive sims for a long time—ever since 2002’s Arx Fatalis. But he’s still not sure how to effectively describe them to people. In a recent interview with PC Gamer, he explains how big of a marketing hurdle the genre is, and why some brilliant games have suffered because of it.
“If you don’t hit the market, it doesn’t matter how good your game is,” he says. “Prey is a good example of that, where it was sold as an immersive sim. It’s an immersive sim in every way one can imagine. But because of that, there were a lot of marketing points that were spent in trying to explain to people with an immersive sim is.”
Despite being one of the best immersive sims around, Prey didn’t meet Bethesda’s sales expectations, which inspired it to mandate a change in Arkane’s direction. This is how we ended up with Redfall, and why Colantonio ultimately left Arkane in 2017.
Most immersive sims can hide behind the label of a different genre, though. Dishonored is a stealth game, Baldur’s Gate 3 is an RPG. Those are known quantities, and thus significantly easier to market.
“Nobody wonders what an RPG is,” Colantonio says. “We might debate whether the Bethesda RPGs are an immersive sim or not, but who cares? The market just understands what an RPG is. Same with Baldur’s Gate. If you say, ‘This is an immersive sim,’ you’re going to have a tiny percentage of people that are super excited because they know what it means. And then the other ones, they’re going to be like, ‘What is an immersive sim?’ And then you’re trying to explain to them what it is and they say, ‘Well, that sounds like most games. Every game is trying to be cohesive. Every game has possibilities. What are you talking about?’ It’s like, ‘Nah, man, if you don’t know, you don’t know.’”
Colantonio reckons that there’s a possible future where immersive sims won’t even be a genre anymore—not because it’s a dead end, but because every genre will have an immersive sim quality.
“I wouldn’t be surprised at some point, if the industry goes the right direction, the immersive simness of games is just going to be invading every genre of games. And it won’t even be a word anymore. People will just say, ‘It’s a good game’, or ‘It’s got some depth’, or ‘I like how interconnected the systems are’. Because immersive sim is just a weird label that has somehow, I think, focused some of the developers too much into trying to belong to that special school, rather than just making a good game.”
I would be extremely happy if this future came to pass.
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