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."

Comments

Who's hardcore?

[seebs]

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.

Atari say's please use caution...

[grapeape]

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.

Re:Atari say's please use caution...

[AKAImBatman]

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.

While you are correct, I think it's important to understand that the crash of '83 can't happen again. The factors that made it happen simply don't exist anymore. Those factors are:

1. Atari did not want to allow third party developers for their console. Third party developers sprang up anyway, and started chucking out whatever they could possibly sell. Since Atari had no licensing arrangements with these companies, there were no quality control checks in place. Today's console makers require licensing arrangements to prevent exactly this sort of problem. (And to make more money!)
   
2. Just before the crash, there was a general feeling that the gaming market was going to experience unlimited growth. This was not the case, and there ended up being more game producers than the market could reasonably handle. Gaming did experience quite a bit of growth, however, and the current market size sits at not-quite 200 million consoles. That's an incredibly large market.
   
3. The crash would have been nothing more than a slump if not for a man known as Jack Tramiel. He was determined to make his Commodore computers take over the gaming market. Thanks to a price war with Texas Instruments, he was able to smash the price barrier between consoles and computers at just the right time to put everyone else (both consoles and computers) out of business. (Or at least in a world of hurt.) Stores threw out all their console garbage and started carrying computers. Computers and consoles coexist at a similar price point today, but computer gaming has been largely deemphasized over the years.