Slashdot Mirror
Casual Gamers Not So Casual
Next Gen is reporting on a study indicating that casual gamers actually play quite a lot, putting the term 'casual' under a microscope. From the article: "'Our survey has determined that mainstream audiences dedicate a substantial amount of time to gameplay — not just in 15-minute increments as previously thought,' said Loren Hillberg, executive VP and general manager of commerce at Macrovision."
A lot of Nintendo DS games. Brain Age, for one, can be played in 15 minute increments. On top of that, closing the DS puts it to "sleep," so you don't even need to wait for a save point in those RPGs. :)
Usually those videos are made by cheating... using emulators and the ability to save-state and pick up where they left off if they screw up even slightly.
These days, most of my gaming is what I'd call casual: I pick up games that can be completely played in 5 minute blocks.
Now it just so happens that I'll likely get hooked once I start and play a good dozen of those blocks and find an hour has gone by - often longer still. But, if I knew I had to invest an hour to even try, I likely wouldn't pick up the game in the first place.
So, yes, casual gamer play sessions are often much longer than one five-to-fifteen minute block. But, no, that doesn't mean you can create a game that requires those longer average play times and still capture the same market. It's a false conclusion based on completely missing the low barrier to entry aspect and fixating on average playtimes.
In short: Casual gaming isn't about short play times. It's about the ability to play for short sessions and thus having a low barrier to entry that then leads to those longer play times.
And with that, I'm off for just one more game of sudoku.
If you look at what results are really being looked at, you'll see that the sample of "gamers" was all people who go to the Trygames site, which IMO is not exactly the mainstream outlet for gaming. That over one-third of these people are 35-49 years of age, etc., is probably not representative of the gaming community that most are familiar with (console and popular PC games). I was at first very confused as to how anyone could have *ever* thought that "casual" gamers only play in 15-minute intervals (meaning that 20 minutes is teh hardc0re?), but then again a hardcore gamer wouldn't be able to stand Trygamer's offerings for more than 15 minutes anyway. ...Well I'm not sure where I was going with that, but in any case I wouldn't be confident to claim this is a very comprehensive study of the market if I were Macrovision. That is, when they say things such as "what the industry previously thought," I'm not sure who exactly makes up this "industry."
I like basketball!!1!