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The Changing Face of Gaming
The Aeropause blog just finished up a three-piece series looking at how gaming has changed in recent years. The first post looks at how the retail business has changed, and how gamers will be buying games in the future. The second post examines how gaming has changed for collectors, how downloadable games and emulations have changed that hobby. The final piece looks at how gaming itself has changed, with the rise of online gaming changing what gamers themselves look like. From this last article: "What about the more considered example: the stereotypical 'hardcore' gamer disconnected from society, normal sleeping hours, and financial rationality (ie. shelling out for a PS3 at launch). Is this disconnected gamer also soon to become a thing of the past? In a sense, some already have. With the focus on 'network-centric' gaming, gamers have become a social bunch. Hoards team up in online games to defeat bigger enemies and bring home bigger bounties. Even obstensibly offline games have item trading and community rankings. If you're not online... well... you're not really current and 'hardcore'."
I consider it to be more hardcore to be playing offline then online. The vast majority of online games are casual gamer fare.
Yes, in the future you will no longer own a copy of a game. Instead you lease (or maybe even rent) a copy (for the same price as you previously owned a copy). Even with hard copies of games you will find yourself locked out in the future because it requires an online activation.
I will drop my intimidating shout...
Am I the only person who really hates the labels Hardcore and Casual?
They seem to be used in every article or blog when they reference gaming yet there is no real standard to their use; there are so many variations that they have very little meaning. Think of their use in MMORPGs as an example, how many people have heard the Hardcore vs Casual debates when it comes to raiding content, PVP rewards, Player Looting, and even Role Playing? In every one of these it has a different meaning an references a different group of people with a completely different perspective.
As for the article, the "Face of Gaming" is always in flux and what people view gamers as largely depends on their personal experience. In 2001/2002 videogame playing (probably) hit a peak as far as mainstream acceptance because of the massive marketing push from Sony and Microsoft to sell their new consoles, and because of how many (seemingly normal) people were playing videogames. From what I have seen, the XBox 360 and PS3 are currently working against this by focusing all of their effort on attracting the most dedicated 10% of gamers with features that don't matter to most of the population; this drives the price up and makes the only visible gamers among these super dedicated gamers (the dedicated population of any activity are pretty lame, just look at "super sports fans").
Online gaming is obviously not a mainstream gaming activity at the current time. When you consider that 100 Million PS2s were, 20 Million XBoxes and 20 Million Gamecubes were sold in the last generation (with tens of millions of gaming PCs available) which means there are probably (at least) 100 Million distinct gamers in the western world and the most popular online game in history has 5 Million subscribers.
I thought it said the CHALLENGING face of gaming, implying gamers are all ugly.
I am not an ugly gamer! I am a human being!
Gaming is just another form of entertainment, like every other activity it has started relatively small and has gained acceptance and mass appeal over time. The PC market and lately Nintendo seem to get that. They are doing a good job of appealing to people who like games but dont obsess over them while still offering the depth that attracts the "hardcore" gamer. As time progresses I think we will see more "casual" games as more people accept video games as a "pastime". I agree with Sony's president that the generation after this may not even have store bought media, all 3 are positioning themselves for this already with Xbox live, Virtual Arcades and Consoles. Downloads of small time wasting games will IMHO become very popular with the casual crowd, look what popcap did on the PC, everyone I know over the age of 3 has at least one of their games because they are cheap, easy to play and above all fun.
Thats the main reason I really believe that Nintendo is in a position to win this generation, even if the hardware is more last generation. There are far more casual gamers and game curious people out there than hardcore gamers and they are going directly after that market. My father even asked if I had seen anything about a game that lets you play tennis and golf with a remote control, he said he read about it in a magazine, he only subscribes to stull like Time and Newsweek so evidently the message is getting out. Casual gamers wont shell out the big bucks if they dont know whether or not they will ever play it enough to get their money out of it, which is where Nintendo has a huge advantage. Yes, I know that with all the accessories the Wii leans alot closer to 360 pricing but a casual gamer will buy the cheap one, try it out then feel completely justified in buying accessories like extra controllers because they will by then know that it was worth the investment.
Sony and Microsoft wont fail either imho, the market for "hardcore" gamers is clearly large enough to support a console, but I think I new breed of gamer is being created that is even larger.
Actually, dickhead, it's because of the secondhand market. Try reading, then jerking your knee.
.. says the article. And thanks to the 360's Live Camera, just like a party, they can now get drunk and flash their various bodyparts at you. Truly, this is a bold new age of gaming.
I seem to recall there being licence agreements in some games saying that the users are effectively renting the software. Granted, the control was then with the user, but they still, in theory, had the ability to declare any game a pirate copy, legally dodgy as that may be.
That's what I'd consider myself anyway. I've been playing games for a while, and both this and the fact I've recently started using a Gamefly style rental service, seems to have left me with a low tolerance for crappy games. If I come up against a really stupid thing in a game then I usually end up shoving it back it the rental envelope. Granted, I occasionally take it back out and try again, but mostly it ends up going straight back to the rental place.
I'm curious where those of us who have been hardcore online gamers since '96 fit into this whole deal.. especially when we're playing the same games we played back then? :D
The "US vs THEM" mentality allows only that.
Yeah, because people have never pirated games until, uhm, about a week ago.
Or maybe people did always pirate games, and there were no more games?
I think I'm a bit confused about the past. Please enlighten me.
The gaming community is a continuum of players who play for different things, for different reasons, at different times. To suggest that there is a binary "hardcore/casual" divide is only a generalisation, sure, but it's also an unhelpful one. It is a divisive concept that only serves to hinder effective debate and understanding.
Clearly a better measure of how "hardcore" a gamer is - at least from an objective pov, to which most gamers do not subscribe - is how much of their free time they spend gaming. Telly addicts tend to watch TV during most of their spare time, which would suggest they're "hardcore". If they have the opportunity to do anything of an evening, they'll watch TV. Then you get those who enjoy spending time watching telly, but find that they don't enjoy doing it all the time. Then there are those who just keep an eye out for or hear about the odd thing that they'd really like to see, so they just watch it then, or similarly those who occasionally flick it on for half an hour and then go "meh", and switch it off. Finally there are those who never watch it or don't own a telly, and don't see what the fuss is about. Interestingly, the most addicted are those who get into soaps and drama series with an ongoing plot/plots, who would feel that they were really missing out if they missed an episode - a clever hook employed frequently.
And so with gamers. There are some who don't own a computer/console, or who have one but use it for only the most utilitarean of functions. There are those who enjoy the occasional bout on a comfort-game or something new that they're interested in. There are those who really enjoy gaming when they do it, but have other things they'd rather do sometimes. At the far end of the spectrum are those who either order pizza every night or die of exhaustion & starvation in internet cafes. An interesting hook for such addicts is the MMORPG, where there is a continuous development of the experience (plot) and you don't want to get left behind. Spotting the parallels?
Most importantly, none of these are "categories" of viewers or gamers. They are just distinct points along a continuous line of users. People tend to categorise TV viewers according to how much they watch, what sort of things they watch or what interests them - whichever categorisation is most appropriate at the time. One day gamers will be categorised in a similar fashion, and only at that point will these articles and blogs make any sense outside of anecdotal observation. They certainly won't be reliable studies until then.
Meta will eat itself
"From what I have seen, the XBox 360 and PS3 are currently working against this by focusing all of their effort on attracting the most dedicated 10% of gamers with features that don't matter to most of the population;"
Microsoft and Sony have market researchers, predictive analysis, and lots of money that goes into determining what features will turn a net profit.
What do you have?
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs