I'm a pretty big horror fan, but the only thing I found scary about TSW was the combat.
And yes, it is a niche title or it would probably be selling more. Maybe a lot of horror fans are not also MMO fans? I couldn't say.
I'm also a big horror fan, I teach horror genre and film making for Film Studies, and i've been into horror movies since my first betamax video nasties of the early 80s. I'm also a big fan of Lovecraft and read pretty much everything, played CoC pen and paper regularly since Chaosium brought it out, and the concept of solving mmo puzzles via the internet in a kind of LARP way really appealed to me. I'm an mmo playing horror fan so to all intents and purposes I am the niche audience this game is aimed at, but after playing beta and a month I wandered away and didn't go back.
So maybe it isn't just that this is a niche game, maybe it's also not keeping hold of the niche audience it's trying to attract?
TSW is not a horror game, the Devs have said this more than one time, IT IS NOT A HORROR GAME.
Unfortunately the perception of any art, and even games, isn't in the gift of the producers. People are free to interpret a product as they wish, regardless of what it was intended to be. I'm sorry but it doesn't really matter what the devs say the game is, or what their intent was. When I played it, and many others too, I instantly placed it in the genre of horror. Horror in the broadest sense of the word, not just blood and gore zombie horror, but encapsulating alien horror, cultism, Lovecraftian dark fantasy, Egyptian mysticism, Transylvanian haunted landscapes, but nonetheless horror. Ragnor says it's 'dark fantasy' but that's just semantics in my opinion.
Of course it also doesn't matter what genre I think it is, since that's my opinion, but my view is as valid as that of the devs.
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Unfortunately the perception of any art, and even games, isn't in the gift of the producers. People are free to interpret a product as they wish, regardless of what it was intended to be. I'm sorry but it doesn't really matter what the devs say the game is, or what their intent was. When I played it, and many others too, I instantly placed it in the genre of horror. Horror in the broadest sense of the word, not just blood and gore zombie horror, but encapsulating alien horror, cultism, Lovecraftian dark fantasy, Egyptian mysticism, Transylvanian haunted landscapes, but nonetheless horror. Ragnor says it's 'dark fantasy' but that's just semantics in my opinion.
Of course it also doesn't matter what genre I think it is, since that's my opinion, but my view is as valid as that of the devs.
In a market dominated and saturated with Fantasy or Sci - Fi games, a game with a modern setting is a niche game within the genre of MMORPG's
Taking the OP's logic .. millions of people like apples .. so in an MMO where you played as an apple it wouldn't be niche