This is wizards of the cost all over again. Unity learned nothing from them.

I’m old enough to remember these terms developing. I can remember when the first Diablo came out and called itself an ‘ARPG’. There was some controversy over this term and simply the use of the term RPG. As video games developed, there was some prestige around the ‘RPG’ label. By the late 90s, you were looking at a lot of well loved and top games using the term. Gold Box Games, Bard’s Tale, Ultima, JRPGs like Phantasy Star and Final Fantasy, Dragon Warrior, etc.

Diablo is the first game that I can recall that really prominently advertised itself as an ARPG. They did this of course because it wasn’t really as deep as the rest of them. There weren’t a lot of ‘choices’ to be made in this game. You set up your character and ran through the dungeon. They wanted to use the ‘RPG’ label because it was well regarded at the time and helped move units. It was a lot like calling an RV a sports car because sports cars have wheels, doors, can drive on the road. ARPGs had RPG mechanics, in that there were things like stats and you could choose abilities/spells on level up. But they really weren’t RPGs.

Around that time in PC Gamer there was a great column about what made an RPG an RPG and it was clear that games like Diablo weren’t it, the key from that was an RPG had players making meaningful choices that had a lasting impact on the game world. Whether you threw fireballs or lightning bolts wasn’t exactly a meaningful choice that had impact on the game world.

When it came to JPRGs vs RPGs, the difference was always fairly clear. RPGs were of the D&D variety. While they featured magic, the system itself was somewhat grounded in reality. JRPGs had a distinct style. Big numbers, wild combos, certain aesthetics, etc. To me the JRPG label makes sense, because it is a different style of game. I would note that JRPGs though really didn’t fit the definition of RPG for the most part, a lot of ‘RPGs’ didn’t because there was very little decision making. They were quest style games where you had a party that levelled up, but you weren’t making many decisions in the game that had much an impact.

I think the labels are absolutely important for distinguishing the type of game it is. People want to know what they’re getting into when they play it. If I’m expecting Baldur’s gate and get Diablo, I’m probably going to be a bit disappointed.

He’s sharing data, that his company collected, but there remains the question of what the data exactly is. I mean, I don’t think any of us were born yesterday, and we’ve seen ‘science’ and ‘studies’ in journalism and how they’ll massage statistics and use vague terms to make specific claims. My favourite of this was years ago a study about cosmetics, which includes things like sun cream, was used to paint the narrative that all Korean men were walking around with make-up. While make-up was a subset of cosmetics, when you actually looked at it, it didn’t really support the claims they were making in the articles about it. For the most part I rarely trust anything like this being shared unless I can have a look at the whole package.

There are real studies and real science behind all these stories, but the journalists and middle men can rarely be trusted to present them in an unbiased manner that can be verified.

so I’d think it’s likely that he’s reporting it accurately

That’s not really a safe assumption to make. Even though they shared their methodology they don’t seem to have shared the questions or the data. Misleading survey questions aren’t uncommon.

No Kotaku is acting like this. There was a distinct lack of evidence in their article

Some suggested the data is wrong or that the owner stats are skewed by moms buying consoles for boys

This isn’t acting poorly, this is just questioning the methodology, which is a good idea, because a lot of these surveys are very poorly done or have obvious holes in them like that one. .

They later shared the methodology, but it still isn’t clear what the exact questions were.

The rest of the article is the Kotaku writer speaking very vaguely about people. Was it 2? 200? 2000? who responded like this? You certainly wouldn’t know from that article, but Kotaku isn’t shy about painting all gamers with the same brush in the headline.

It’s really quite bad. This time around the system has gone through banned the throwaway I used last time, so now I have to make yet another throwaway to get a message through to them. On top of that, they’ve really dropped the ball in Modsupport. Used to get response within a day, maybe 2 at the most. I’ve been weeks without a clear reply there lately. Other than ‘oh we see you were unbanned that time, so no worries bye’ even though I’d put several questions to them about why they hadn’t cleared the suspensions and bans from my account history and a few other mod related questions.

They need to fix everything. I can barely report anything on the site without being banned for it. The admin come around later and fix it and apology, but because that’s happened so many times, safety’s first response is permanent ban which means I have to use an alt to contact them and get them to fix it. Despite the fact that they told me several times all the suspensions and warnings would be removed, they aren’t. I reported something for being a duplicate a couple weeks ago (it was there was another copy on the front page of the sub, and it was one of their report reasons) and came back an hour later to both a permanent ban notice for ‘report abuse’ for that, and also the fact that my account wasn’t actually banned because someone had come through and unbanned me. The site is bordering on being beyond repair at this point.

Some quality of life improvements are great, some aren’t. It would be nice to have a tutorial/experienced mode for it just to cut out some of the fluff