This one has me completely confused. “Farming Simulator 17” is an extremely detailed and realistic hardcore simulation (more like a training simulation than a game) in which you have to perform practically every step-by-step process that a real farmer would do in first-person, including hooking up your tractor to your manure spreader (after finding the right shed) and then slowly backing it out without running into things; and countless other detailed steps. But it is selling phenomenally well according to all the indicators: a million copies within the first month; and on the day of its release it ranked #1 among ALL games on all platforms (including consoles) in Germany, #3 in Scandinavia, #4 in France, #5 in the UK, according to this article: Farming Simulator 17 ploughs through the competition | Eurogamer.net
SteamCharts shows that it’s still getting a huge amount of playtime: 8,404 simultaneous players at the last check within the last hour, and a peak of 31,000 simultaneous players, compared to 6,208 at last check and 24,000 peak players for “Don’t Starve Together” (to use one example of another game that did well). It has over 8,500 reviews on Steam, ranked “very positive”. The series (which has several earlier games before “17”) has also spawned a legion of similar games by other developers who are evidently trying to cash in on this genre, and many of those have done well, too.
This clearly isn’t just a “niche market” thing, given the large number of sales and top ranking in some countries. And I don’t see how it can appeal to the Farmville group, since the latter game was a cartoony, abstracted version of farming with cute characters and so forth. The game is extremely well done in terms of realistic graphics and detail; but it’s hard to believe that a hardcore farming sim would be such a popular subject, especially since it’s so time-consuming to do basic tasks. Here’s a gameplay video:
It’s a part of a style of games I like to call “Zone Out.” Games like this, the various trucking simulators, that sort of thing offer a very relaxing playstyle that allow the player to sit back, relax, and have a simple set of tasks set before them to play through, but never tasks that are super demanding. The kind of thing you put on a podcast to listen to and just sort of, well, zone out. I have about 130 hours logged into Euro Truck Simulator for this reason, and about half as many in Farming Simulator 2013.
Sure, but there are tons of games that provide that type of relaxing, repetitive “zone out” activity, but most of them do not achieve the phenomenal sales of “Farming Simulator 17” and “Euro Truck Simulator 2” (which seems to have sold even better than Farming Simulator 17). Is it the extreme realism of these two games that attracts people? Maybe they’re tired of the cartoony work / tycoon games because there are so many of them?
My guess would be that it just hit the right overlap between being “memeable” and having appeal to the simulation crowd.
Basicly simulation games fly under the rader for the general public while having some very dedicated fan bases but for farming simulator 17 there was a big push on social media (not just in the english speaking part) which went along the lines of “Wow, that´s actually a thing - Ain´t that weird?”. So a lot of people saw it and a lot of people bought it out of curiosity to mess around with “being a farmer”.
Most people than dropped it after playing it a bit but the simulation crowd as usual keeps stacking obscene amounts of hours into the game - also thanks to this a bunch of people got introduced to the appeal of simulation games for the first time. Lastly thanks to all of this Farming Simulator has major name recognition now so the like gets easier to sell since more people actually now have an idea what those games are about.
Besides being a time to zone out, it’s a cathartic experience of doing something that requires order and discipline, and putting your life together one step at a time, doing something that doesn’t involve the uninspiring combination of boredom and uncertainty contained in everyday life.
Fortunately, I found something in real life for myself for this particular need. But I definitely feel the pull.
I Love it, pretty sure I got about 1000 hours booked. Very relaxing game, no pressure, always something to do.
Oddly enough though, I did find an asset one day, and did a double take and a screen shot, yep its the one that I also have in my own game, available free online, rights and all. (not even a farm game either)
I no longer feel any lowliness about using free or store assets no more!
They can do it, so can I.
Yes, but there are thousands of games that offer similar relaxation for those who like repetitive simple tasks, and yet this one made tens of millions of dollars (or hundreds of millions?) What caused this particular game to take off so much, and likewise for the somewhat similar trucking games like “Euro Truck Simulator 2” (which seems to have sold even better)? Is it the realism and real-life pace, as opposed to the numerous casual games that have repetitive tasks but not the same feeling of actually doing real-life work? Or is it the real-life vehicles which many people (or at least, many men) seem to get excited about even if it’s a tractor or a semi truck?
Wish I had an answer, keep asking myself what it is. Not sure if ‘repetitive’ is the word I’d use.
Maybe it’s just the Open World thing, no rules, its just there, do whatever you feel like doing.
GTA is alot like that, you don’t have to follow the ‘story’, just drive around, find and interact with it all.
There’s no real win or lose overall, small set backs maybe that don’t effect anything, that’s about it.
I don’t believe it has anything to do with “relaxation” or “repetitive simple tasks”. That’s a gross simplification and the fact that there are so many games like this that are not successful tells me that their developers didn’t understand it either.
I believe it’s about experiencing an activity that has existed around you in some form for your entire life but that is almost impossible for the majority of people to experience now. Buying a farm, purchasing the equipment, hiring the workers, and so on is extremely expensive and would require a major life style change to manage.
A simulator allows you to experience it in a limited fashion without changing anything and without any real expenses.
Perhaps the people who buy these things aren’t gamers per-se, but are instead farming, truck, driving or model enthusiasts?
If you frame it like that then it’s not competing with the rest of the Steam catalogue as games aimed at “gamers” are, it’s competing with a tiny number of other similarly targeted products. They can then advertising in driving, farming, model hobby and other arenas which don’t get much other video game competition. And then they’re also being compared to other related products in terms of price rather than other games.
Farming is pretty interesting to me. I like simulation games. I’ll probably check it out some time.
But a game where you drive trucks? God that sounds boring.
Like angrypenguin said, I bet this game is advertised in unorthodox places, like farming magazines, etc, so you get people who never cared about video games but are interested in a video game actually portraying something they do know/care about.
Yes, that’s true; but so many of the people who play these two games have said they find them relaxing because they can just concentrate on simple activities (or in the case of the trucking sim, they can watch the beautiful landscape roll past while just focusing on driving). Look at the reviews on Steam, or Murgilod’s comments here.
Many (or most, and possibly all) of the Youtubers who have made videos about these two games tend to be general gamers who also play shooters etc. The people who have written positive reviews on Steam are generally people who also play a lot of other games. They seem to be mostly men, including a lot of young men who talk about how “cool” it is to buy that new John Deere tractor or semi. And the colossal sales (tens of millions if not hundreds of millions of dollars for both of them) couldn’t be generated by a few ads in farming magazines, especially since one or both of these games held the #1 spot for all games on all platforms in some countries shortly after release, and the #2 or #3 slot in other countries. Non-gamers aren’t going to produce those types of sales figures.
There are three groups of people who clearly have some degree of overlap, something like this:
You’re looking at people in the purple/orange intersection of those groups and assuming that they’re representative of everyone else. But not everyone who plays games writes reviews on Steam, and not everyone who plays games makes videos about it, and so on and so forth.
On average, if someone who’s into farming purchased a simulator because of that interest I’d actually be pretty surprised if they went on to write a review for a gaming community, or started streaming about it. I just don’t see why they would, for the same reasons that I don’t jump on a car forum after playing some Gran Turismo.
Heck, the people who write reviews on Steam aren’t even necessarily representative of gamers in general. Those of us engaged in that culture just get that impression because it’s what we’re most exposed to.
By the way, I meant it when I said “perhaps” and ended that sentence in a question mark. I don’t know who’s buying the game. Maybe the truth of the matter is that a huge number of gamers are closet farming enthusiasts and this game ran into that by happy accident. That could be the case. I’m just not assuming it to be so.
If it’s getting an unusually high number of physical sales compared to other games, as is being implied here, then that suggests that it isn’t your typical Steam audience buying it.
A look at the Steam forums for American Trucking Simulator (probably ETS as well) would confirm this. Lots of truckers there. Impossible to say proportions of course, but they dominate the discussion there.
(not even a farm game either)
