Most of EA's releases, though, are within long running series, which dodges the issue since most RPGs within long running series also sell extremely well. And why wouldn't they? That's kind of the reason a series lasts so long to begin with. Just because EA releases their football games at a faster rate than Square Enix releases Final Fantasies is effectively a non-issue since we're talking essentially repeat customers and name recognition at that point, not genre devotion. When I think of "niche" or "fringe" I'm not thinking entries into a series that number into the double digits. What if Square Enix releases 25 Final Fantasy games tomorrow? Well whaddayaknow, all a sudden the RPG genre just became the most mainstream evar! What if EA scales back and Madden and NCAA come out once every three years with updates in off years distributed through DLC? I guess football just magically became less mainstream?
My original point was merely that if you're going to say that a fairly large number of million selling titles (FF, Mass Effect, Elder Scrolls, etc.) doesn't make a genre mainstream because there's a last gen system and a handheld spending their twilight years getting bombarded with middling, budget, and often nameless RPGs then you could just as easily turn it around and say that for all of EA's success it doesn't really make sports games mainstream because all of the sales are heavily localized in a single location, distributed among very few series just the same. If you want me to change the genre then I have no problem doing that. I'm pretty sure every single genre has the same story. A handful of extremely successful franchises and a bunch of other games that are either modest successes or utter failures. That is, except for the genuinely niche genres like dating sims or Mahjong or something.
But all this doesn't even matter because, like I said, the simple fact that there are so many modest RPGs proves the genre has mainstream clout. Otherwise these games wouldn't be published.
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