Both are examples of players ignoring the official goal of the game to do something else; the fact that some describe the something-else as “winning” and others describe the something-else as “not winning” might be a red herring. Just because a player is willing to chase some weird goal they made up themselves doesn’t mean they’re willing to chase some weird goal that the game assigned to them.
Alternately, if you’re seeing half the players don’t care about winning and I’m seeing 10% of the players piously declare their loyalty to “winning” (regardless of actual rules), well, that only adds up to 60%; we could both be accurately describing different sub-populations. (Don’t put any faith in that 10% number; my actual data is “nearly every discussion thread on this topic has at least one person advocate this position” and I have no reliable way to turn that into a percentage of all players.)
I mostly think these are different sub-populations, but I don’t believe the sub-population you’re describing is as large as 50% of the market; I suspect you self-selected to write a comment about them because they’re over-represented in your play group. Also I suspect many of those players only act like that in certain types of games.
From a sales perspective, I’m more concerned about the larger subgroup of players who are confused by weird goals than the smaller but more vehement subgroup who outright defy them. Nonetheless the second group may be a bigger problem than their numbers suggest, because they might ruin a peacewagers game for everyone else at the table. If peacewagers becomes popular then players will eventually solve that problem by segregating themselves, but while it’s a weird new thing that no one has experience with, those players may be randomly mixed in and if (say) 10% of players are game-ruiners then they will ruin much more than 10% of games.
Our observations aren’t necessarily in conflict.
Both are examples of players ignoring the official goal of the game to do something else; the fact that some describe the something-else as “winning” and others describe the something-else as “not winning” might be a red herring. Just because a player is willing to chase some weird goal they made up themselves doesn’t mean they’re willing to chase some weird goal that the game assigned to them.
Alternately, if you’re seeing half the players don’t care about winning and I’m seeing 10% of the players piously declare their loyalty to “winning” (regardless of actual rules), well, that only adds up to 60%; we could both be accurately describing different sub-populations. (Don’t put any faith in that 10% number; my actual data is “nearly every discussion thread on this topic has at least one person advocate this position” and I have no reliable way to turn that into a percentage of all players.)
I mostly think these are different sub-populations, but I don’t believe the sub-population you’re describing is as large as 50% of the market; I suspect you self-selected to write a comment about them because they’re over-represented in your play group. Also I suspect many of those players only act like that in certain types of games.
From a sales perspective, I’m more concerned about the larger subgroup of players who are confused by weird goals than the smaller but more vehement subgroup who outright defy them. Nonetheless the second group may be a bigger problem than their numbers suggest, because they might ruin a peacewagers game for everyone else at the table. If peacewagers becomes popular then players will eventually solve that problem by segregating themselves, but while it’s a weird new thing that no one has experience with, those players may be randomly mixed in and if (say) 10% of players are game-ruiners then they will ruin much more than 10% of games.