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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'."
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.
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.