Mindless Diversions Extra: The “Nerd Cave”

From Games Radar: Dragon Age maestro says EA always spoke about a hypothetical ‘nerd cave’ full of diehard RPG fans who would “always show up,” so you “didn’t have to try and appeal to them”

A Dragon Age veteran says EA liked to refer to a “cave” where RPG fans who could be trusted to buy anything the genre threw at them would dwell.

Speaking to GamesRadar+, BioWare veteran David Gaider explained that before he left BioWare, his tastes had become somewhat “old-fashioned” in EA’s eyes. “I was very vocal on the Dragon Age team,” he says. “I was always trying to push it to our traditional mechanics. And that wasn’t very welcome in the EA sphere.”

He says that EA considered those mechanics – the kind that shaped games like Dragon Age: Origins – to be “slow and cumbersome,” rather than the “action-y and slick” presentation that the studio was being pushed toward. That meant that Gaider’s views “were often not very welcome” despite his long tenure at the studio and work on many of its most famous RPGs.

That’s partly because, he says, EA didn’t think the traditional RPG audience was one that was worth focusing on. He claims that the overseers referred to those mechanics as being “‘in the cave'”. The cave, he explains, “was where nerds went. The nerds were in the cave. You made an RPG and the nerds in the cave would always show up for an RPG, because it was an RPG.”

Over and over and over and over again, we see the same mistake being made: “The old audience can be taken for granted. What we want to do is appeal to a newer, better, hipper audience!”

I mean, let’s say that the RPG audience is 1 million people. (I made that number up because I am lazy.) So if you make a really good RPG, you can expect to sell 1 million units.

Let’s say that the Madden audience is 5 million people. (I made that number up because I am lazy.) So if you come out with Madden 2026, you can expect to sell 5 million units.

The RPG audience and the Madden audience has *SOME* overlap, but it’s negligible. Generally, if you sell an RPG, it’ll be to someone who didn’t buy the latest Madden game. If you sell the latest Madden game, it’ll be to someone who didn’t buy an RPG. There are exceptions, yes… but they’re not really relevant to the larger point.

A marketing “genius” who says “If we make our next RPG more like Madden, we will be able to sell up to 6 million units!” may, on paper, be correct but, in practice, this is likely to result in a game that appeals to neither the nerd cave members nor the people who stand in line to buy the latest Madden every year.

The people who keep showing up for Madden are there for *MADDEN*. They want to play this franchise that they’ve been playing for years and years. They don’t want football with swords. They don’t want an RPG with a football minigame. The RPG fans might be willing to endure a good RPG that has a football minigame, but they don’t want football with swords either.

It’s like the old Aesop “The Man, The Boy, and the Donkey“: “Please all, and you will please none.”

When there is a huge breakthrough of this or that RPG that collects a whole bunch of players who are usually fans of other genres entirely (Elden Ring, Hogwarts Legacy, Expedition 33), it’s not because the game went out of its way to appeal to as broad an audience as it possibly could… it’s because it was so appealing to its core audience and so very good at what it did that it was appealing to people who aren’t usually fans of the genre.

By making a game that was good, that was *REALLY* good, they made a game that would appeal to people who usually played games like Madden.

If you go out of your way to appeal to the Madden base while ignoring your current base, you’ll end up not pleasing anybody. But if you’re really, really good at making a really, really good game that shines and shows off the best parts of what makes your genre great, it’ll appeal to people who usually aren’t fans of your genre.

And when companies forget this, they end up experiencing layoffs and studio closures and stock price drops.

The nerds in the nerd cave have one hell of a backlog and don’t mind replaying one of the games from 10 (or 20) years ago that changed everything rather than paying sixty bucks for an RPG that goes out of its way to say “we’re not catering to the guys in the cave!!! We’re catering to *YOU*!!!”

If the new Mass Effect fails, it won’t necessarily be because it wasn’t “good”. It’ll be because, instead of appealing to fans of Mass Effect, it’ll try to appeal to people who never cared for the franchise.

And marketing won’t understand why people who never cared for the franchise aren’t getting the latest installment of it.