RPGs go mainstream in the west

[Leo_A]

And second, writing off my list as "just a handful of exceptions over the last few years" is blatantly moving the goal posts. Since when were we talking a slew of football (or sports in general) game releases in a single calendar year? Was that ever a parameter set for RPGs? Did anybody ever stipulate to counting releases within a set time frame?

Her argument is that most RPG's don't sell well. Thus, the genre can't be considered mainstream since most releases in the genre go largely ignored by the gaming public.

Since I guess we're debating now what the word most actually means, I think it's safe to say that to the vast majority of people, most at the very least means that the number in question has to at least outnumber the other number. Yet EA Sports football releases far outnumber the releases of any competition and that's been the case for years now (Since at least when Sega lost the NFL license and abandoned their well recieved NFL2K line, although I suspect even then that EA was releasing more football games in their two franchises than the competition combined).

The number of non EA football releases on the Xbox 360, for instance, is a grand total of 8 after nearly 6 and a half years (Just barely averaging one non EA football release a year). Yet the grand total of EA Sports releases in this genre, the ones that account for the vast majority and the ones that actually do well, accounts for 19 releases (Including their two releases slated for later this year, the only upcoming football games in the genre on the release calendar). Even take away EA's own NFL Head Coach and NFL Tour releases, which presumably sold poorly judging from the lack of sequels (Not including their Madden XBLA game since that apparantly was a sales success) only changes the number to 17 releases in hugely popular series to 10 failures. How exactly do the poor sales performers outnumber the successes?

The fact is, most football games do sell well. The exact opposite of her reason why RPG's aren't mainstream where only a small number of releases get any sort of attention from mainstream gamers. Thus, you can't use her logic against her because her logic would still consider the football genre mainstream since the vast majority of releases perform well sales wise.