Do you think a My Little Pony game licensed by Hasbro would sell? Maybe an open world game? I mean, the brony fanbase is quite sizable. Or do you think it would get dismissed as a shovelware game, since games based on shows like MLP are ususally of decidedly poor quality? I think it would make quite a bit of money.
Hasbro is incredibly unlikely to do anything that doesn't target the demographic of the show. If Hasbro makes - another - MLP flavoured game at some point, it will be incredibly generic, simplistic and it will be targeted towards children between the ages of 4 and 7, since that age group bracket makes up some 90% of the audience of the show.
An official MLP:FiM game console game, targeted at Bronies, would most likely do quite well. In the United States alone, there are 314 million people. Assuming that 1 in 500 people are Bronies (the exact number is hard to pinpoint, so I just averaged a few estimates that I found), that's 628,000 Bronies. If a quarter of them bought the game, that comes to 156,500 copies sold. Considering that console games go for fifty bucks apiece, that makes for a grand total of $7,825,000 in sales, in the US alone. Compare that to the original Halo, which reached 6.43 million in sales, worldwide.
A census did a rough estimate of there being in the order of 150 000 bronies world wide. The demographic seems to be concentrated in a few cities, but sparse everywhere else (ie. the estimate for Toronto and the GTA is ~200 +- 10, compared to a population of over 7 million people).
I think perhaps you're underestimating the size of the fandom. I saw one survey that put the number of adult MLP fans (not necessarily calling themselves "Bronies") as high as 1 in 100.
I think they could make it like Animal Crossing or Harvest Moon, where you build relationships with the ponies.
Yes, 1 in 100 people who did the survey. In one sample space. You're grossly overestimating the size of the fandom. If you want proof, look to the number of people who attend cons. The most I ever saw at a con I was announced as 5000 (including staff, vendors and performers), which was at Everfree Seattle last year. I think it was 5000. In retrospect, it seemed like a lot less, so I might be mistaken. Speaking from personal expirience, the number of bronies I have run into in Toronto (4th largest city in North America) over the course of the past 3 years is... 1. That was only last week actually.
That's just the conventions, and is in no way an accurate gauge of the whole fandom. Look at Comic Con... they had 130,000 attendees in 2012. Does that imply that powerhouses like DC and Marvel only have fanbases in the hundreds of thousands? Of your personal experiences, I find it odd that you ask every single person that you see whether or not they're a Brony, but that's just my opinion.
Bronies have been part of said demographic for about 3 years now. :v And no matter how many there are, i think the majority of MLP fans atm are bronies. They'd make more money selling a videogame than they would selling plushies.
@Wintermute , @Ridley Wolf , I think you're both grossly underestimating the number of adults who identify as bronies. An estimate by The Wire proposes anywhere between 7 to 12 million teen/adult bronies in the U.S. alone (which, considering there are 317M+ people in the U.S., doesn't seem like too outrageous an estimate; it's barely more than 2% of the population). Of course, I personally feel these numbers are a little too high to include only the teen/adult demographic, so it would be much safer to say that 7M-ish accounts for the entire U.S. fandom, target demo included. But because it's just an estimate, let's be extremely conservative and whittle that number down to a solitary million teens/adults who watch the show. And to be even more conservative, let's say that only half of these people were willing or able to buy an official game by Hasbro at $50 a piece: That would net a generous $2.5 million. Perhaps some may see that as a number to sneeze at, considering what most triple-A titles tend to net, but it would certainly put Hasbro in the black in terms of profit. And if there really are at least 7 million of us in the U.S., you can rest assured that these figures would be way, way higher. There's no business POV I could view this from that says producing such a game would be a decidedly bad idea.
Whatever the fandom size, I'm sure more than a third would buy the game, even if it was around £30 ($50). Heck take the Mobile Game, It in no way appeals to me, and I haven't actually bought in game currency but I still play it now and again when my Pony cravings start ticking. The market is certainly there, It just depends if Hasbro are willing to take the risk and if they do, What shape or form would the game come in. Free to play, MMO, Casual, Sim? Legends Of Equestria is still in Alpha and that's had a lot of discussion in the Brony community, So for Hasbro to make a game, I dread to think how much drama would come of it.
So there is a lot of things being said in this thread that I think is a bit misinformed. - I don't know where everyone is getting $50 for the standard console game price, I'm pretty sure most new games now are selling for $60 and have been on HD consoles since 2005. Only Wii games were priced at $50. - Last I checked, Hasbro was still making more money off their products aimed at young girls than stuff made for the "bronies" I use this when citing demographics and I know it's a little old, but assuming everything has remained relatively the same then I think it's safe to say that audience of the show is mostly children. Seeing as shows that have huge periphery demographics don't tend to last (Invader Zim and Young Justice as examples) then I'm inclined to believe that Hasbro is still seeing the target demographic profitable. - 150,000, in terms of full on professionally produced games, is bad. I'm not sure if I would consider it failure but it's still not good. - Comparing modern sales figures with that of a game which was released 13 years ago is also not a really good comparison since development costs have grown a lot since then. - The average multiplatform "next-gen" game costs roughly 18 -28 million dollars to produce and the average single platform game costs roughly 10 million dollars to produce. So, who here said that making 7 million was going to be profitable to Hasbro? Because even an average game has a lot of overhead. Afterall you're going to need designers to actually make the game good, programmers to put everything in, artists and animators to make the visuals, and then depending on the type of game, a ton of content. I'm pretty sure that once you sit down and figure out all the specifics, a free-to-play town simulator starring ponies is going to seem a lot more reasonable than a large open-world action adventure RPG starring ponies. If you ever look up "niche" in the dictionary, I'm pretty sure you're going to find that game. - While some indie games have made due with less, indies have the advantage of being able to rake in 100% of the profits. Probably a lot different when you have a license owner like Habro expecting to make a profit as well as continuing to pay the developers, who are also expecting to make enough money to stay in business. Broken Age raised roughly $3.5 million and even that wasn't enough to finish the game and other developers have been known to also work second jobs to make their dream projects. I mean, I still would love to see a good quality console game starring ponies, but it's just I don't really see it as something feasible. Besides, there's a lot of fan games out there they fulfill that purpose already. To answer the actual question, I don't know what kind of game I would like to see on a console. Probably something narrative driven like something Telltale or Double Fine would produce.
Bronies and pegasisters really aren't as common or influential as they like to think, and they're not even close to a large factor of the show's success. FiM was always designed for the whole family from the get-go, and it hasn't changed very much from that orientation. If not for 4chan, we wouldn't even have bronies at all. Hasbro has, however, adjusted the toyline to add brony-approved paraphernalia for several reasons: - Because even individual bronies happily throw loads of money to anyone with a talent for rendering simple cartoon ponies in various media; even in low low numbers their spending habits are worth a fortune, and Hasbro isn't about to let that money walk out the door; - The heaps of cash they're making from Bayformers give them a lot of wriggle room to take risks; and most importantly - Because those brony-focused toys almost always appeal to little girls anyway The bottom dollar is still the same demographic that My Little Pony has targeted for thirty years: little girls. Hasbro will do whatever doesn't alienate that group, and swiftly axe everything else. As for the question of Hasbro licensing "a game": I don't think Hasbro is going to be approving any "real" pony games anytime soon. They're going to keep making simple, Barbie-esque "social games" because that's the safest option with the least chance of alienating young girls. We're not going to be seeing any FiM JRPG's for a looooong time, if ever.
