Levine wants games to be featured on mainstream outlets

Ken Levine would like to see games shown through more mainstream outlets, as doing so would bring more attention to the sector than advertising alone.

Speaking in a Gamers With Jobs podcast just before his E3 appearance on Spike TV, Levine said outlets that appeal to more than just gaming's target audience could help a lot of titles get noticed.

Levine used an experience he had with market research as an example of how a more mainstream approach to getting the word out about a game could help matters.

"We had a room full of college students, in some fraternity in some state school somewhere – this is about a year ago – and they had never heard of Bioshock. None of them. Not a single one," he said. "I think as an alpha gamer you assume that, 'whether you've played Bioshock or not, you've heard of it, right?' These guys had never even heard of it.

"I mean, how many times have you seen images of Transformers? Whether you want to or not you've probably seen it 15 or 20 times... We're making products that cost however many millions of dollars and have the potential to have a large audience, but... to get people who aren't alpha gamers there's a whole different kind of activity that you have to undertake.

"We need to be on mainstream shows, we need to be on NPR, we need to be on The Daily Show, we need to be in those places talking about what we do. We're still ghettoized as game developers, and Spike TV is a great place in the middle, but we really need to think about how do we reach out and talk to people so you don't have a room full of college kids saying, 'I've never heard of that damn thing.'"

Levine goes on to say programs such as the Daily Show, or the like, could do with having folks such as the BioWare doctors, especially since a lot of these shows will book a guest whose novel has only sold 15,000 copies, when many a gaming title will sell much more.

You can read more of this over on GI.biz which listened in on the podcast.