Young people need to be converted from COD to proper games

[Ashwo99]

Hello,
My first post but have been playing war games for 12 years.

Well, my point, I am 15 years old, I started off at the age of 3 playing panzer general on my fathers knee. I have grown up playing these sorts of games, sadly I have noticed hardly anyone I know cares about the genre, they ask me what game I'm playing when I get home, I say Panzer corps, the reply is usually COD followed by some grunts at my choice of game. Sadly In this day and age I feel that if it's not COD its rubbish is the mindset of many children today, I am slightly worried that in 50 years these games will have practically died out, I'm trying to convert some of my friends, so far I have managed to get 3 copies of battle academy, 4 of Panzer corps and 1 of commander the Great War bought my my friends, and the response has been positive. So I think other young people playing should do the same, convince their friends to try this games and older gamers, if you have children get them into these games and get them to tell their friends. We can get more people off COD we can challenge the FPS as the dominant genre, I say long live the wargamer!

[VPaulus]

Welcome to this forum, Aswo99.
Don't worry we plan to stay in business for the next 50 years, producing more wargames.
In fact we are now producing more wargames than we haver done in the past.

[Ashwo99]

Well, hurrah for that

[Huskie]

Never knew about the genre until recently but I have definitely found a interest in CTGW and enjoying every second of it! ^^

[DeathMutant]

On a side note, I play "World of Tanks" (essentially a FPS but you are driving a tank) and have noticed that the "CoD crowd" frequently dies early -- and uselessly. I am sure they are good at shooting enemy tanks but WoT emphasizes maneuver, deception, timing and (sometimes unspoken) team coordination over "twitch" skills. It is not possible to "Bunny Hop" in a tank either.

[Huskie]

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[MrsWargamer]

On a side note, I play "World of Tanks" (essentially a FPS but you are driving a tank) and have noticed that the "CoD crowd" frequently dies early -- and uselessly. I am sure they are good at shooting enemy tanks but WoT emphasizes maneuver, deception, timing and (sometimes unspoken) team coordination over "twitch" skills. It is not possible to "Bunny Hop" in a tank either.

That bunny hop comment has made my day

[MrsWargamer]

I am not really surprised that wargaming has done very little to encourage the young to be interested.

Too much of wargaming has for too long been dominated for too long by miserable old buggers who simply refuse to entertain anything other than themselves and their own agendas.

Games like ASL are not a good ambassador to wargaming. Too elitist and too bloated and too little in common with what made the original work in the first place.
Games like War in the East, too many of the fan base worship the notion that IT is the best in wargaming even though it has nothing in common with the board game wargames of the 70s that gave rise to board game wargaming to begin with.

It has only been the successes of games like Panzer Corp and Battle Academy that have made wargaming able to break out of the stale delusion that wargaming has to be played on a PC at all costs. It doesn't. Clearly the success of the iPad releases shows that wargames can be played on any of the current devices on the market. And there are successes on the Android platform too. And the multi player in Battle Academy is second to none so all the complaining about it looking cartoony is valueless.

When I played my first wargame, I was a teenager too. And they were simple and basic and able to be played in a single sitting.
If ASL and War in the East had been my first exposure to wargaming, they would have been my last too.

I don't think there is anything wrong with liking games like Call of Duty or Battlefield. In the 80s we called those games arcade games. I spent a lot of quarters running around shooting things all day too. And then I got bored of the no challenge no thinking and went back to playing games that required actual thinking.

But the entry point still needs to be on the level of the novice.
I'd rather pay 3 bucks to play Tactics II on a tablet, than have a tablet able to run War in the East. Because I can't picture it being any fun to play War in the East on anything other than a 40 inch TV screen.
Some games are only going to appeal to a narrow group of hard core fanatics. And if you don't win over any new blood, you never create tomorrow's fanatics in the process.

As the population of today's mostly 50 something wargamer audience becomes eventually 60 something, the wargaming market better have spent the time making new wargamers, or they can in time, kiss their industry good bye. I'm currently looking forward to my 60s reading my books and falling asleep in my chair. I probably will have left the wargaming hobby about that time. Telling me there are still a few people in their 60s playing wargames doesn't impress me. The numbers won't keep a business afloat.

Wargaming isn't dying, it's aging. There is a critical difference.