It is interesting, isn’t it? It feels like mech games should fall into similar categories as Call of Duty, or at the very least World of Tanks. But generally speaking while some mech games find relative success (Armored Core 6) most are considered niche hits at best. But why is that?
Mech Games Tend To Be Single Player
I’m not saying every successful game has to be multi-player, but in the current landscape of influencer and viral marketing it does seem like multi-player games fair better than most. There have been the rare few multi-player focused mech games in the past (Mechwarrior 5: Mercenaries, Chrome Hounds) but they always struggle to gain popularity.
Mech Games Are Complicated
By their nature, mech games tend to have a lot of moving parts. While some may not have many more mechanics than the average first person shooter, they tend to have much more depth making them more difficult to jump into, and potentially having the learning curve be so steep it creates toxicity in the multi-player arena (similar to what League of Legends deals with).
Mech Games Are Too Slow
This is a weird byproduct of how we interpret size. It’s not uncommon for a lot of mech games, especially western made ones, to throttle the overall speed of movement of the player character down to a crawl to express size. In our human brains large objects move slower even if they are actually moving quickly (like a huge commercial jet flying across the sky). Several mech games use this technique to express the intended size of the mechs, but to many players it just makes the game feel slow.
Mech Games Don’t Fulfill A Western Power Fantasy
This is arguably the most controversial of the bunch, but there is a strong assumption that mech games don’t appeal to western audiences because the players cannot imagine themselves as the protagonists. Whether that because giant robots are more far fetched or that mechs just generally look less like humans one can’t be sure.
Power cycle complete, see you tomorrow…