goddammit these threads are so stupid, but i am suprised that this one comes in the heart of ski season. usually this is a summer ns topic for people who are still too functionally retarted to have discovered the searchbar function.
the general public has a perception of skiing that is much different than their perception of "action sports." almost everybody living near mountains or hills (or even north of the mason dixon line) has had some experience with skiing, be it renting gear on a school trip or recreationally skiing groomed runs with the family and the such. think of your home mountain, especially the midwest hills. how many of those people do you think see skiing in the same light that we do? 5% maybe? if that even?
for a media company to even consider there is another, more extreme side to the sport is one thing. for them to put the marketing and development behind a game, to convince the general public that a ski video game is more entertaining than their real-life experiences of someone snowplowing down the bunny hill then waiting in the lift line would be too costly. the return on their development and marketing investment is too small for them to consider it even feasable to do more than an exploratory investigation into the target demographic.
sports like wakeboarding, snowboarding, surfing, etc... are not things that the general public tries, or if they have, they still see them as extreme. by playing games of those sports, they have a chance to feel extreme by proxy, to validate not trying such dangerous, radical activities in person. no one sees skiing like that outside of people involved in the sport on our general level or those close to the small percentage of us that make up the ski industry.
while a site like ns.com is a big deal in the freeskiing world, it isn't even on the radar of the vast majority of recreational skiiers, let alone non-skiers. to think that a petition or list of how many members have xboxes or nintendos or whatever would even make a video game executive bat their eye is foolish and it shows a lack of perception of the size of the market for home lesiure products. there are websites about those stupid fucking cats with silly faces and terrible spelling that have more members than us. maybe they should make a game out of that.
you should all be happy with the bitching game quazbotch made, enjoy the updates he puts in, and thank him for caring enough about an industry he loves to put the effort into progressing the tracks game to the level he has.
