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Hardcore to Be Pushed Aside This Console Generation?
Gamasutra asks questions directly of analysts on a semi-regular basis, in a feature they call 'Analyze This'. This week they quiz analysts about the rising influence of casual players, and what this means for the dedicated hardcore gamer. The ubiquitous Michael Pachter: "I think some portion of family growth will come from aging of original Xbox owners, who will have families of their own and will likely play games with their children. I also think that newer features on the Elite, like the 80GB hard drive, will encourage more family activities, like downloading TV shows and movies. In essence, I don't see [Microsoft] trying to cannibalize the Wii audience, so much as to trying to offer an alternative with the Xbox 360 as the home media center. I don't think that there is any real threat to the long-term survival of the Xbox 360."
Downloading TV shows and movies are family activities? That doesn't sound like a very rich family life to me. Family activities are things like sailing trips, playing scrabble, and laughing at Dad's grilling abilities. Or even waving wands around in front of a TV in a game of Wii boxing...
"just to keep them occupied while they're fornicating in the back room with the neighbor."
The kid or the parent? I sure wish I could've fornicated with the neighbor (down the street, not next door mind you) while playing my video game system when I was a kid. That would be sweet!
Gaming will cease to be a teenage phenomena, it won't be something that kids do that their parents don't understand, being a "gamer" won't put you in some sort of "elite" hobby, you'll just be a normal person.
Other than that, things won't change, except you'll have more choices. While the casual gamer market is growing and has the potential to be very large, the hardcore gamer market still has plenty of money to spend, the game industry knows that, and they're already set up for and experienced with serving that market. They're not going to completely abandon it to make minigames, the industry is just going to grow to cover the new types of games.
The only thing that will really change for hardcore gamers is that they'll increase the amount of bitching they do about all those ordinary people trying to pretend that they're real gamers. "They don't know what it's like, they've never played for 14 hours straight, they don't have eight obsolete consoles stacked in their basement, why don't you go play on your cellphone"
The market isn't shifting to casual games, it's growing to include them. Things might look a little strange right now because publishers are testing the waters a bit, but it'll balance out soon enough. Valve isn't going to abandon Half-life to make bejeweled clones, there will be plenty of MMO's and RPG's in the future. There's not much to worry about.
One time I threw a brick at a duck.
I maintained a personal branch of Wine so I could have more function keys in World of Warcraft -- Linux supports more function keys, so I remapped them into modified keys WoW could handle. I've learned programming languages to work on games. I semi-regularly put in 16-hour days of gaming when I'm looking to destress. I have not one, not two, but THREE game-playing devices with me everywhere I go.
I could give a shit about another "40-hour" FPS, but surgery or hypnotism would be involved.
The Wii is the best thing to happen to my console gaming experience in years. The PS3 is utterly irrelevant to me as a gamer. Yeah, yeah. Cue the people claiming I just can't afford one; I've had one since last December. I run Linux on it. The games are just more derivative crap. The total interesting play time of every PS3 game I've seen put together can't come within a full working week of what I've gotten out of Wii Sports Tennis alone. Paper Mario is the first platformer since the Genesis Sonic era to do something I haven't already gotten bored with.
You think I should consider kids who can't get off on a game unless it's gory and their parents don't want them playing it to be "hardcore" gamers? I don't. When they're into gaming enough to write games, when they've been playing games more than a few years, then they can talk. Until then, they're just wannabes.
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Gamers carried the console manufacturers before the "casual" gaming boom and will be the ones who carry it afterwards. There are have been numerous casual gaming era's before and though they make for interesting blips in the manufacturers and developers bottom line, they don't last. Anyone remember the early 80's? The biggest contributor to the great video game crash of 83 was the over abundance of crap in the marketplace. Abandoning the "hardcore" gamer market which has higher expectations, demands more complexity and can not be fooled by licensing deals and pretty graphics sounds like a great idea in the short term but in the long term will only lead to disaster for the industry again. There is a place for casual gaming, and a great opportunity to introduce the non- initiated to gaming, but it's just that an introduction.
I agree that Sony will win the HD format war, but I don't believe that it will convey any real advantage to Sony. The uptake on HD formats has been incredibly slow. Even if Sony were to wipe out HD-DVD tomorrow, they would only inherit a very small piece of market share.
I have to disagree. If the PS2 proved anything, it's that very few gamers will support more than one console in their home. The hardcore types had a Gamecube (only $99!) as well, but that didn't stop the GCN from being the worst performing console that Nintendo ever released. (~22 million units worldwide) Microsoft didn't fare much better, just barely edging out the Wii's sales. (~24 million units worldwide)
All this adds up to a single, inescapable conclusion: The casual market is a zero sum game. There can only be one winner who takes the lion's share of the market pie.
This is what a lot of people keep missing. The PS2 continues to go strong because it appeals to the casual gaming crowd. It may have initially sold well because it was a cheap DVD player, but that offered the market a way to reach the casual gamer. (Whether it was understood at the time or not.) Those customers are extremely happy with their $120 DVD/Tetris/Guitar Hero machines, so why should they spend $600 for a PS3? The answer, of course, is that they're not going to. They may purchase a Wii, but it's only because it provides gaming possibilities that their existing machine doesn't. And they don't need to break the bank to get one.
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What Pachter is forgetting is that the casual market very rarely buys more than one console, which completely screws up the whole "hardcore first, casual second" strategy he's suggesting for the 360 and PS3. That simply won't "work" in the way he thinks it will, because by the time the 360 and PS3 are ready for casuals the vast majority of them will already be playing the Wii. That the Wii has also attracted some number of hardcore players is the icing on the cake.
It will "work" in the sense that Sony and Microsoft might turn a profit, but not in any sense they'd like. It's a strategic failure to let a competitor horn in on your turf while simultaneously leaving them to frollic freely on theirs. The "tried and true" strategy worked previous because everyone was doing it. You don't have to delve far into history to see how often the "tried and true" got usurped as humanity moved forward.
By the time the 360 and PS3 hit the "magic number", it will already be too late. Assuming the PS3 drops at the current rate, that's a $100 drop every 8-9 months, putting the now $499 PS3 at $199 in August 2009. That's 2 full freaking years of letting Nintendo run amok with the casuals. Sony is going to need exclusive rights to Spore in order to rip casuals off of the Wii by then. Nothing short of that kind of casual star power is going to cut it.
Barton:
An 8 to 10 year lifetime might work, if the PS3 attracted the casual crowd. The casual crowd isn't quite as obsessed with aging graphics as the hardcore, and so will keep an older system long after hardcore players have shelved or sold it. The inherent problem here is that the Wii and DS are picking up all the casual players. Unless Sony can find a way to break them away from Nintendo's offerings, the 10 year lifetime won't happen. 4 years from now the hardcore will move onto the next big thing. The Cell is a neat processor, but it is not enough to keep up with the advances that will be made as time passes.
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Unfortunately, it's not a myth of the industry so much as it's a myth of gamers. They fight over the meaning...some think it means FPS players, some think it means those who play only the most obscure of games, some think it just means people who play absurd hours of games. It's just like any club of sect of society...for some reason certain people like labels and feel strength and security in numbers.
The sad thing is, as a 28 year old life long gamer, starting with a Commodore 24 and currently owning practically every home game console to be mass produced since (save the PS3 and the Xbox 360), I wouldn't even consider myself a gamer at this point. While I play games and own over a thousand, it seems that these days it's not about playing the games themselves so much as it is having the best gear, best graphics, most violence, cinematic sequences, etc. I used to smile when playing games, now it's all too serious and realistic. I've actually gotten anxiety from playing some of the newer games, and that's not really cool.
In that sense, maybe I AM a casual gamer. So, in this day and age, can a veteran gamer who's been gaming nearly 25 years be considered a casual gamer? I suppose so, by definition.
Wise men say, "Forgiveness is divine, but never pay full price for late pizza."
You mean like The Sims outsold any FPS ever, even without counting the expansion packs? Don't mistake your own preferences for the One True Blockbuster. There were a _lot_ of games that sold very well in spite (or maybe because) of having little or no violence.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not against violence as such. But if you're going to make claims about what sells, it would be, you know, nice, to actually look at some sales numbers and not just extrapolate based on what _you_ have bought. Not everyone is a clone of yourself.
A mistake many people make is assuming, basically, "there are so many violent FPSs, because everyone wants to play a violent FPS." Actually, wrong. The rise of the FPS was based on the fact that what counts isn't the raw sales, but sales minus expenses, a.k.a. profit. At the time when FPS was rising and, say, Adventure games skirted with extinction, actually adventures were a growing market and routinely outsold FPS. But the costs of making a modern adventure were rising faster, whereas an FPS was damn cheap to make. A FPS could make a bigger profit even if it sold half the number of copies. _That's_ why everyone rushed to make an FPS.
Violent games as a more global category, are a vaguely similar case.
Coming up with an idea like Sim City or The Sims or Civilization or Tetris, is something that requires someone to come up with a brand new idea. And it turns out that there's a severe shortage of people with ideas that are (A) genuinely new, and (B) not crap. And there's a lot of risk involved, since basically you're not sure of point B until you actually launch the game. You're betting a huge bunch of money on something that you don't know how many people will like. Being a new idea, the marketting department can at best take a guess.
By comparison, it's a no-brainer to make a violent game. Wop-de-freakin'-do, so this time it's with more damage textures and more death animations. That's sooo creative. Not. And you already have a good idea of the market too. You just need to look at how many people bought last year's game, and you can have a pretty informed guess as to how many will buy the remake in higher (and gorrier) res.
So the fact that everyone and their grandma does a violent game, isn't because it's the only thing that sells. Quite on the contrary, the other category outsells it quite often. They do violent games, because it's the simple, cheap, no-risks way out.
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...will encourage more family activities, like downloading TV shows and movies. Is this really where society is today? In my childhood, the whole point of family activities were to keep us away from brainlessly watching the TV./* No Comment */