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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."
In general parlance, could someone who plays in increments of less than 15 minutes be considered a 'gamer'?
Doesn't surprise me. Other than RPGs, I think I'm pretty casual. And I usually end up playing a few hours. What makes you hardcore is when you do nothing else.
15-minute increments
... RPG's usually take longer than that in between save points ... what games were they thinking? Pacman & Frogger?
What game nowadays can you play in 15 minute increments? Absolutely no sports games
Nope there is more to it than time alone.
I think of myself as a gamer, but the reality is between work and family I don't have the time to play as much as I want. I'll play a game of football, do a mission on Halo, or play SSBM with the kids maybe 3 times a week. I, too, would be considered a casual gamer, but I am not in the least interested in the "casual game market," nor would I likely put casual in my descriptor.
I'm reminded of a point made in regards to creative writing: write something you want to read. Not something you think others would like to read, but something that you would enjoy reading. Maybe gameshops should work more towards making games that they enjoy than trying to capture a certain market segment.
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A 2 hour game of poker would be considered casual by many.
It's not about how long you play for, it's about how dedicated and obsessed you are with gaming. It's about your taste in games, what games you play, what consoles you own, how long you've been playing, the variety of gaming experiences you've had, and many other factors. It's not just how long you spend playing that determines whether you're casual or hardcore.
People who have casual sex rarely break the 15 minute mark.
Interesting. Indeed.
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I think the difference lies in the kind of games you're talking about. Usually, casual gamers play flash-based or card games. Games like "Diner Dash" are very short, and you won't spend much time trying to beat it. Ok, you can spend a 5-hours session playing it (I won't discuss if you actually do it or not), but the game won't take more than a short amount of time out of your life, in comparison to big games like RPGs, MMOs or others. In the end, the casual gamer will beat the game (or get bored of it) and move on. The hardcore gamer will seek another game. That's the difference. And that's why a lot of us feel like hardcore gamers because games are part of our lives. Casual gamers don't. They use games for entertaining, but they don't make a huge deal out of it.
This is my honest opinion, and can be debatible, of course.
well this guy could beat Super Mario 3 about 4 times over in 15 minutes
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.
...but at the end of the day the difference between "hardcore" and "casual" I settled on wasn't necessarily how long a person played, but how hard it was to save/quit/get out when you had to put the game down.
This applied specifically to whether or not a person could raid in World of Warcraft, but I think it applies to gaming in general - it isn't that "casuals" wouldn't play for 4 hours at a stretch, it's that they couldn't commit to a playing schedule and actually keep said commitment consistently enough to a) not piss of the other raid members and b) not upset Significant Others.
Just try playing WoW for 15 minutes, and see how much you can do...
.4 gold per stack of 20. Obviously, there's money to be made buying it at .4 and selling it at 1, and it doesn't take but 5 minutes to log in, check on the current price of linen and several other items subject to the same fluctuation, buy some if it's cheap, and list some for sale if it's expensive.
Surprisingly, a lot, especially if you like to play the market to get rich. The auction house is great for folks who just want to log on for a couple minutes. I doesn't take long to search through items looking for underpriced stuff that you can resell for a profit or seeing if the market is ripe for listing your goods. You can make quite a lot of money keeping an eye out for obscure rare items that many players don't realize is a component in an epic high level recipe. For example, Black Diamonds are quite rare, and on my old server, you could get 40 gold for one easily (40 gold isn't a fortune, but it's a pretty good chunk of money). With some regularity, one would drop for a player unaware of its value who would happily part with it for 5 gold. 35 gold profit right there, and nearly no time spent.
Likewise, there are items whos value fluctuates greatly from day to day, especially with low level crafting components. Linen cloth is a great example. Linen is a critical component for building your tailoring skill. Every few days, some rich player will create a new character who they want to be a tailor, and they'll wind up wiping out the linen market, driving the price way up. When there aren't any on the merket, you can easily sell linen for 1 gold per stack of 20. After this happens, the supply will gradually replinish and the price will go back down, usually stabalizing at around
In addition, many (nowhere near all, but many) of the quests all the way from level 1 to 60 can be completed in 15 minutes. Also, most quests can be done in as many sitting as you want, and you can log out anywhere, so if you have a quest to kill 20 harpies, nothing's stopping you from killing 10, logging out, and then killing the other 10 next time you log in.
No, you can't do everything in WoW in 15 minute chunks, but 15 minutes is certainly long enough for you to accomplish something. In fact, the stuff that only takes 15 minutes tends to be the most productive per time spent! It's easy to spend 4 hours raiding and walk away with nothing but a high repair bill, even if you're playing your best. Spend four hours over a couple weeks playing the market, and (assuming you're careful) you're likely to walk away with a bundle of cash.
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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.
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My observation on Casual Gamers, in MMORPGs atleast - is quite often, many of them seem to put in more time into the game then the 'hardcore, uberguild-raiding type'.
/played. My friend, was level 35 with around 50 days /played time.
/very/ well and very efficently. They were more like robots then players.
I'll use myself, and a friend as an example.
- We both started playing EQ at the same time, and for the first month of play we stayed pretty much neck in neck in terms of levels. We'd duo allot, goof around, have fun, explore. Somewhere along the line, I got bitten by the 'power-gaming bug', and ended up taking off in levels past him.
We started to play together less and less as our play styles started to differ. A few months passed by, and I was level 50, farming items in Lower Guk and raiding Plane of Fear when I had the chance. I was level 50 with around 32 days
IMO, he was a 'casual gamer', not because of time invested, but because of how he chose to spend his time playing the game.
Many 'uber-guilds' in EQ had the reputation of playing '24/7, having no lives, etc, etc'. While there may of been a few individuals in the guild like that, that wasnt the norm. With the exception of new expansions or new level caps, in which many people would take a few days off work to max out as fast as possible. The typical play routine for many of my guild mates was
- Logon about 30 mins before a raid was to start, play for the duration of the raid, and then logoff directly after. If it wasnt a raid day, they wouldn't logon.
Trying to find more then maybe, 10 or so people from the guild online at once outside of raiding time was pretty damn rare (with the exceptions of a new expansion).
To me, casual gaming isnt so much the time invested, but HOW you use the time that you invest while playing. Some of the most hardcore power-gamers I know played the least, but just played
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."
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Likewise gamers: if you play more than I do, you're a hardcore powergamer no-life. If you play less than I do, you're casual.
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