gargus: ...mature doesnt always mean titties and blood, I mean mature in the sense of a mature mentality...
Have you played Sanitarium? That's always struck me as a remarkably mature game. It seems to be targeted at an adult audience, and as you say, not because of extreme violence or sexual content, but because of a deep engaging story which deals with psychology and the subconscious mind.
The problem with AO content is that the way the rating system is set up, as soon as you hit an AO rating, you've confined your game to a niche market. Since the niche market won't be satisfied with just a little AO content, you may as well go all the way. That's the reason the only games containing explicit sex scenes are crappy porn games. You mentioned Mass Effect, and you can be damned sure EA wouldn't cut itself off from selling those games to all the teenagers in the world. Conversely, if it
had received an AO rating, people would expect it to contain a lot more sex than it actually did.
The thing is though, that the adult market isn't actually a niche market anymore. Or rather, it is, but only because the industry has made it so.
According to a recent study by the ESA, the average gamer is 30 years old. This means that the target demographic for AO games, from a strict viewpoint of age, is far more than half the total market. That's hardly a niche anymore. But for some reason, the industry still thinks of sales in terms of teenagers, even though their parents probably buy far more games than they do.
A few interesting points from that study:
- The average age of a frequent game buyer is 35
- Women 18 or older represent a significantly greater portion of the game-playing population (30%) than boys age 17 or younger (18%)
- Adult gamers have been playing for an average of 14 years; males average 16 years of game play, females average 12 years