With as young a medium as games is (and it is young, as old as we all might feel), it’s no surprise that it would burgeon new genres, and that said genres would be called into question. Metroidvanias! That’s a potentially silly one, with a common argument being that it tells you nothing about the genre itself. I prefer Japan’s search action as a name myself, though I am but one humble games journalist. A genre I hadn’t called into question until today, however, is extraction shooter, a name that a former Bungie lead apparently disliked so much he tried to get the studio’s marketing team to make something else up for Marathon.
The Bungie lead in question is the developer’s former director of product management Chris Sides, who left the studio last year. Speaking on the Shooter Monthly podcast (via TheGamePost) of Helldivers 2, Sides said that “The problem is, Helldivers 2 can be called an extraction shooter, but it’s not. The genre name is so bad. I hate the genre name of extraction shooter. When I was working on Marathon, I was working with marketing, dying to be like, ‘Can we please create a different genre name,’ because extraction shooter is so dumb. It’s the only genre where its name is a mechanic.”
Sides called into question as to whether or not Helldivers 2 is an extraction shooter simply because you can extract, arguing that it’s not because it’s not like, as an example, Escape From Tarkov. “So, the terminology of the genre is already terrible; it really makes it hard to compare these games,” Sides said.
I think that Sides is right to frame it in terms of a marketing perspective, because I think within the world of games genre is much more about selling a game than it is about denoting a particular expectation of it. A good film marketer does not sell one solely based on its combination of genres, yet games marketing does this frequently; I’m so glad you made a roguelike deckbuilder, but what is it actually about? Hit me with that first!
That’s kind of the real issue, that marketing is incredibly genre-forward, and part of why I think Marathon has struggled to find an identity. Sure, I understand the basic principle of the thing I am doing in Marathon, I want to be given a stronger reason as to why I’m doing it, and to feel some of what Bungie can do so well, their social elements. If we’re thinking about marketing, we first need to be thinking about what makes the game special! That’s a better place to start than fixating on a genre that is still in the midst of figuring itself out, if you ask me.
