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Nintendo and the Decline of Hardcore Gaming
angry tapir writes "Chris Jager from GoodGearGuide argues that the rise of casual gaming means near-certain death for hardcore gaming. The sales of casual 'party-friendly' games are massively outstripping the sales of classic hardcore games, and the makers of other consoles are taking note of Nintendo's success in attracting non-traditional gamers to the Wii and DS. There is evidence that Sony and Microsoft are both trying to tap into the casual market, and it's only a matter of time before hardcore gaming goes the way of the Nintendo PowerGlove."
Of course, the trend toward casual doesn't just involve Nintendo — World of Warcraft's success (and the huge effect it's had on the MMO genre) is often credited to its focus on casual gamers. While it's not unreasonable for game studios to want all players to see all of the game's content, perhaps there's a better way of catering to the more hardcore players than tacking on difficulty modes and "do it the hard way" achievements.
... there's a way.
I'll switch to min-maxing Slashdot if it comes to it.
Ah! Troll mod! Rerolling...
Aside from the vastly outdated Atari 2600 in my basement as a child I was first exposed to gaming in the form of Super Mario Bros., Duck Hunt, and Metroid. :/
I look at some of the games today and while I find them visually appealing, they just don't seem to have the same drawing power.
You can't take the sky from me.
"World of Warcraft's success (and the huge effect it's had on the MMO genre) is often credited to its focus on casual gamers"
Sorry, but if you're writing an article claiming that casual gaming is ousting hardcore titles, you don't pick the world's most notorious timesink as supporting evidence. People who lose their jobs, homes, families and even lives, playing 20 hours a day, 7 days a week are not what I'd consider "casual" players...
Code, Hardware, stuff like that.
The sales of casual 'party-friendly' games are massively outstripping the sales of classic hardcore games
Don't forget that some 'hardcore gamers' also own Wiis. The end is not as nigh as you think it is; people like a change in pace every once and a while.
Besides, what do you think is happening to all the current hardcore gamers? They don't just disappear, you know.
How many times does it need to be said?
Show me that stats that say their main player base comes and goes on a monthly basis.
Show me a casual gamer who DOESN'T buy gold.
World of Warcrack IS a great game, I have spent more than the usual $100 for the game itself. Perhaps that is what the article means? It is likely to bring back people who have not played for a while? Suck them in for a few months, then spit them back out into their normal lives, free from addiction?
Repeat after me : WoW is NOT casual gamer friendly!
This very issue was addressed on VG cats in the last strip
Move sig!
Scan down on this series of graphs that Nintendo showed at the GDC to the graph titled "Nintendo driving US Growth." The level of sales of games across all platforms has been fairly flat for most of the decade... up until the Wii came out, at which point the other two consoles continued to sell at a mostly flat rate but Nintendo's went up and up.
It's sort of a harbinger and a point of relief. On the one hand, When you've hit a wall on the number of people who are really interested in devoting so much of their time to a 40+ hour game, the only way to go up is with people who aren't in that group. Microsoft wants more money just like everyone else, so they have to expand into the same area. But it's still a mark that there's a solid base of hardcore fans as well that are always going to need to be served, and when Microsoft's plans to make the XBox wii-ish fails to bring in a large new audience because they realize that they're not the Wii, they're going to have to think about serving the base that they've got already.
I'm also a bit loathe to decry the sudden death of hardcore gaming when just last year, 2008, we were decrying the fact that we were trying to find time to play Fable 2, MGS4, GTA4, Fallout 3, and a host of other solid games. The fact that release schedules aren't lining up very well in this year's favor isn't going to scare me off just yet, and that's just about the only real evidence that he offers that the hardcore gamer is about to die. What's more likely is that we just won't have the same glut of triple-A-grade content devoted to them.
I don't know why the hardcore gamers are worried, though. They're just gonna spend all their time playing Diablo 3 and Starcraft 2 in a couple of years anyway.
Libertarians somehow believe that private businesses should be stronger than governments but weaker than individuals.
April 6, 2009 - Sony's PS3 outsold Nintendo's Wii during the month of March. Sales of the PS3 were reported at 146,948 units as opposed to the 99,335 Wii units sold. In third place, the Xbox 360 is noted to have 43,172 units sold.
Apparently, Ryu Ga Gotoku 3 (or Yakuza 3, here in the U.S.) and Resident Evil 5 helped urge the PS3 sales, as both games were at the top of the software sales charts. This is, comparatively speaking, good news for Sony's current-gen hardware, though analysts predict that the PS3 will not threaten the Wii's global dominance of the market.
http://www.reuters.com/article/technologyNews/idUSTRE53511I20090406
TOKYO - Nintendo admitted Thursday that its hit Wii video game console was going through its toughest time yet in the competitive Japanese market, but it said there was no plan to cut the price.
"The Wii is in the most unhealthy condition since it hit the Japanese market," Nintendo Co. president Satoru Iwata said. "The current condition in the Japanese market is not the one we want."
But a price war with rivals was not the answer as Nintendo is already the market leader, he said.
"A price cut in a difficult economy cannot really excite the market and drive up sales. As of now I really don't think that a price cut is a good option for us," he told a news conference.
Industry figures showed this week that the rival Sony PlayStation 3 had outsold the Wii in Japan for the first time in 16 months, with sales of the Nintendo console dropping almost two-thirds from a year earlier.
http://www.abs-cbnnews.com/technology/04/09/09/nintendo-says-wii-losing-luster-no-price-cut
- - -
Maybe the casual gamers have moved on and now only the hardcore gamers remain to purchase new software and peripherals? The Wii is at market saturation nearly everywhere and now it's time for the PS3 and X360 to move ahead at least in month to month sales.
For some anecdotal evidence I own all three consoles, each one since their own launch date, and I never touch my Wii (cue childish sexual jokes). In the last month I've hammered away at Valkyria Chronicles and Metal Gear Online for my PS3 for hours upon hours every day. For my 360 I play Virtua Fighter 5 and Fallout 3 regularly as well. And between both the PS3 and 360 I play Street Fighter II HD Remix and Street Fighter IV daily as well. My Wii? Maybe when Dead Space Wii comes out I'll plug the console back in but my god has that thing been collecting dust for months.
Not to mention what hardcore treats the PC is getting coming up by way of Blizzard. I already told my boss I needed a week of vacation off for both of the releases of Starcraft II and Diablo III...
Is hardcore gaming dead because of the Wii? No. Nintendo can't stroke its ego quite that much.
With their latest expansion, the designers have add much more "movement" i.e. a twitchfest with more complicated shot rotations. Something to appeal to the hard-core gamers and drive away the casuals. /dumb
There are literally millions of hardcore gamers! Even if we have a billion casual gamers, there will still be those millions of hardcore gamers.
There will always be a market. If most of the developers are developing casual titles, then there's a decent niche for any medium sized developer to aim for the hardcore market segment.
In fact it's analagous to calling heroin a casual drug because the dealer gives you the first hit for free
If you "do a bit of research" into a game's economy then you're not a casual gamer. If you play 20 hours a week then you're not a casual gamer, and if you play the same game for 20 hours then you're probably also moving up into the "committed gamer" bracket.
What we once dubbed a "hardcore" gamer was someone that played all kinds of games for hours and hours on end while everyone else was doing "real" things (as these fools called them). Nowadays everyone's a gamer. It's casual to have two or three consoles and play a couple of hours every week. That is what the hardcore used to do, they were only hardcore because everything was vastly more expensive and skill was involved. There are still hardcore gamers but they're outdone by the mass of casual players that live up to the level of former hardcore. I think we should think of new distinctions. I, for one, call the people that play only Wii Fit and Samba de Amigo TWATS for example.
The death of hardcore gaming is happening because of the rising dev costs with stagnating sales. The core market is limited in size, it's not really growing much and as such the sales are limited. The focus on graphics among the HD consoles massively increases the development costs (factor 2.5) while very few additional sales are gained from the better graphics (and few sales are lost by having weaker graphics). Without casual gaming it wouldn't survive either because it's collapsing under its own weight, not anything else's.
The success of "casual" gaming merely comes from the massive numbers of people outside the core market who were previously unwilling to buy games. However, their demands aren't going to stay rock-bottom forever and producing highly profitable games with a cheap and crappy dev team in a few months won't work forever. While more complex games aimed at these people will have to look different from the ones that are being aimed at the hardcore they're by no means impossible. Applying the term "casual" however is wrong, these people can and will get very involved in a game they play, possibly moreso than "hardcore" gamers judging by the difficulty modern core games are dumbed down to. That should be considered, we're not talking about people who play a game for five minutes and then put it on a shelf, they've got attention spans much longer than the traditional gamers though they may have less time per game session.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
Someone needs a /hug
What the hell is this guy talking about? Is he stupidly blind or what? Did he notice how many *millions* did Halo, Gears of War, Bioshock, CoD or WoW made? Have he seen how many MMORPG's are appearing? MMORPG's are everything but casual. Sorry sir, but you're dumb.
Also, why is this flawed article on the front page of Slashdot?
As has been said before, Correlation does not equate to Causation! For at least a decade now, the games industry has shown an incredible growth. Its bigger than motion pictures! We can safely say that more people have been gaming, its become less of a social taboo (or sign of nerdiness) and more mainstream. I think it would be safe to assume that with more people gaming, there are also more people going hardcore. Its better to say there are "more gamers" than to say there are "more casual gamers".
"Sarcasm is for *winners*, Alan." - Charlie Harper (Two and a Half Men)
have other people stopped using the power glove for some reason?
Once upon a time, computers were only understood and used by the extremely techno-savvy. They were commoditized because the profit is in the masses, not the experts/masters.
The same thing happened to cars. Where are all the die-hard DIY mechanic's cars today?
It's how it always goes. Not to say I like it that way- I love doing things the hard way- but I can see the writing on the wall.
Look what happened to music when it was popularised. Or movies. Or television, newspapers, radio... When the general population gains interest in something, the market has a tendency to pander to the lowest common denominator. That hasn't meant no more "hardcore" movies or tunes are being made. In the games industry, we get casual gaming instead of Britney or your feel-good rom-com. There will always be fewer people willing to put in time, effort and thought into their entertainment (note that this is not the same as being "addicted"). These few will always be on the fringe of the market. Further, "hardcore" artists, regardless of their chosen media, will always seek to create with integrity, without compromising their vision for the sake of the mass market.
Question everything?
I'm sick of what seems to be the sudden belief that, unless a game has the most up-to-date graphics and is filled with so-called 'mature' content (which seems to be a euphemism for gallons of blood and swearwords), it's not 'hardcore', and anyone who doesn't play it is a casual gamer by default. Gaming is my main hobby, and I spent the majority of my free time and money on either playing games or other related activities; and yet apparently because I don't own an Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, or a gaming-calibre PC, I'm not one of this self-professed hardcore.
And tomorrow the stock exchange will be the human race
Isnt anyone who plays hours of games a hardcore gamer? Plus in regards to high end skill games there is no shortage in the demand. Most people drive a cheap car even though many would love to jam around in a Porsche.
This is just the game industry glut opinion. So you have lots of mush and a few gems thats just how it works.
Haven't they recently added pvp Peggle matches? If that's not trying to pin down the casual market, I don't know what is.
When game designers finally realise that the 'hardcore' gaming community doesnt need yet another console FPS with the words army, tactical, squad-based or post-apocalyptic written all over it, maybe they'll tap into the millions and millions of other game genres/scenarios/storylines which would actually be interesting to play.
Casual games, the American Idol / Britain's Got Talent of the industry.
As Simon Cowell's found out, it's easier to shove out something half arsed that the public will quickly forget about (but not before ploughing millions into first) than to come up with anything original.
The fickle public, I hate you.
Summation 2
(Ill get modded down, but it needs to be said...) Just because Nintendo et al are catering to a previously neglected market for games, thus making more of their revenue form people who aren't traditionally the customer base of the games industry, it *does not* follow that hardcore gaming is being dumped, dying or abandoned in any fashion.
Exploiting a previously unfilled niche, for overall growth does not require that some other aspect of the system loses out. Aside from obvious logical flaws in TFA's rant, observations above don't stack up: since when are World of Warcraft players considered 'casual'? You could be forgiven for making that assumption of course, until you actually meet a few or play yourself.
Hardcore gamers are not going anywhere, even if they aren't going to be the biggest percentage of revenue in the future.
So unless the current mainstream s selling their PS3s in order to buy a Wii - making a change in habits - the overall games market is growing because of the addition of new consumers.
I would have found it a more plausible read if TFA was talking about how casual gaming is a *gateway drug*, and how it is a very clever marketing move.
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
Who needs all the buttons on those newfangled contollers and their sleek, flash consoles?
In my day, real men beat games with only a joystick and one, albeit majestic, button.
The "Big Three" of classic gaming (in order of superiority):
1. Atari 2600
2. Nintendo NES
3. Sony Playstation (the first one)
Video game systems are following relatively the same path as cars:
Cars: 1950's - 1970's = Awesome machines
1970's - 1980's = Mediocre contraptions
1990's - Present = Getting back in to sleek high tech machines, but nowhere near as elegant and powerful as the earlier models of the 1950's-1970's.
Video game systems: 1980's - late-1990's = Classic games (many of which are older versions of 'new' games)
late-1990's - 2000 = Mediocre
2000 - Present = All flashing lights and graphics, very little challenge, complex, but not sophisticated. Development purely motivated by hype, marketing, and profit.
Knowing Google's lust for data collection, the Soviet Union is still alive and well inside the psyche of Sergey Brin....
..even for an outsider like me, putting "World of Warcraft" and "casual gamers" in the same sentence, seems odd to say the least. I associate WoW with people spending several hours per week, even per day, playing online.
But, if I've been wrong, I am glad: there's this beautiful real world that awaits to be discovered - it would be a pity not to do that, and waste your time playing WoW instead.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
The distinction between casual and hardcore does not come from the games themselves, but from the players. You give an hardcore player the most casual game there is and he will still play it as if it were a hardcore game, fiercely competitive, min-maxing every aspect, etc. Chess for example is a pretty good casual game, rules are simple enough to learn relatively fast, a match is short enough to kill some time with a friend if you have nothing else to do, etc. Yet, there are people who dedicate their lives to the game and still won't be able to learn every aspect of it. In my opinion, a game is a game. There is no distinction between a casual and a hardcore game. If the game is well designed, it caters to both audiences at the same time very successfully.
That's the mistake of equating a market segment and a playstyle. The "casual gamers" people talk about when they talk about markets are simply people who prefer games considered crap by the older gamers
When I've seen the term "casual gamers" used, it has nothing to do with what "hardcore gamers" consider crap, but rather about people who play games casually.
The "casual gamer" isn't necessarily casual,
How can the "casual gamer" not be casual? That would make the term meaningless.
that's just a stereotype built up by detractors who want to sweep this massive market under the rug
Say what? Almost every use of the term I've seen is to promote casual gaming, not to detract from itself. I haven't seen casual gamers being afraid of the term, they even use it to describe themselves.
Gaming "outgrew" the simple fun of the arcade
When did that happen?
and with that left a lot of the people behind who were just not interested in this whole "games are art" masturbation...
Whoa. I don't think "games as art" really has anything to do with the "hardcore gamer" - surely they would scoff at the notion? Although I have seen many casual games referred to as artistic and creative.
On the whole, I find your post to be oriented approximately 180 degrees from reality.
... and then they built the supercollider.
He doesn't get it. The hardcore gamers aren't gone, Nintendo has just tapped into a new market - parents, girlfriends, grandparents, young, old and everything in between.
From what I've seen about my friends and family that play wii (and have never played Playstation or XBOX), they get bored of wii sports/guitar hero/wii fit/etc. after 2 or 3 months and then never pick up their wii again. If anything, the hardcore gamers are the ones that are going to stick around and continue to buy new games
It's not that there are fewer "hardcore gamers". There are more casual gamers, that's all.
Sure, gamers grow up and some drop the hobby or tone it down, but a new generation grows into playing at the same time. If anything, the market is growing because consoles are far more mainstream than C64 gaming ever was.
At the same time, young adults who used to play board games in my time (I don't even want to know how much time we spent sitting 'round a table playing) move towards casual computer games. Why? Because now they exist, that's all.
Yes, the casual game market is growing. But that doesn't mean hardcore gaming is on its way out.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
It seems there is a debate about what casual means:
- rare, short, light gaming sessions: the gaming pattern is what defines "casual"
or
- ages 7-77, easily accessible: the accessibility is what defines "casual"
Anyhooo, I guess casual gaming will kill hardcore gaming the same way family sedans killed sports cars. Slow news day ?
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
I'd just like to point out that what is deemed "casual" in World of Warcraft is usually very different from what is deemed casual regarding the Wii.
Actually, in WoW, the term hardcore and casual are thrown around to mean so many different things, they are almost worthless. Before I got bored and quit recently, I was the raid leader and main tank of a medium sized guild. I raided typically 4 hours a day for 3-5 days a week, and spent a quite a bit of time in addition to that farming, PvPing, gearing up guildies in 5-mans, etc.
Your average person would probably call that hardcore, but in WoW, that would be considered casual by many people.
When I imagine a casual Wii player, OTOH, I imagine someone who doesn't spend much time or money playing games, has a Wii, maybe spends a few hours a week playing Wii Sports, Mario Kart Wii, etc, and maybe busts it out for friends. Much different than a WoW casual.
Anyway, the idea that "hardcore" and "casual" gaming are in a zero-sum conflict is silly. Both can and will survive, and there is a huge amount of overlap between the two. "Hardcore" gamers frequently will play a game of Wii Sports now and again for a change of pace, and there's nothing stopping a Wii-loving casual soccer mom from playing Halo 3 on her kid's Xbox 360 once in a while.
Most "hardcore" gamers I know own either all 3 systems, or own a Wii and a 360 or PS3. (I have all 3.) They may grumble about the Wii and casual games from time to time, but most still enjoy a good game of Mario Kart now and then.
Seeing as this is the end of hardcore gaming, does this mean we can finally see the year of Linux on the desktop?
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
I consider my self a "hardcore gamer" in the sense that I prefer games where there's actually some progress to made. No matter whether it's a story that slowly unravels, a character that develops or just new levels which are a little different/more difficult than the previous one. I don't switch on my PS3 every day - not even every week - but still, virtual dart or bowling is not for me.
The reason why people like me have started to look into so called "casual" games is that it's actually these titles that add new gameplay and original ideas nowadays. Whatever game magazine you look at today, the headlines are always occupied by the next incarnation of yet-another-fps (now with even better graphics and more realistic blood, yadda yadda).
There used to be a time (remember the Amiga) where the most anticipated and big games were the ones that had some sort of original idea to them. But these days the game industry is taking the same path as hollywood or the music industry. No one is willing to invest money into something new because everyone's afraid that it might fail. As a consequence new ideas are only developed in the small game/"casual" marked where the financial risk is obviously limited.
Don't get me wrong, I do like great graphics etc. and I'd be willing to shell out 50 bucks for a game anytime. But now that I'm through with LBP I'm really having difficulties to find anything else that appeals to me. So if Sony and friends want to keep the hardcore game market alive, maybe it's time to start risking something again when it comes to investing in new ideas.
This VG Cats comic seemed pertinent to the topic. No I'm not affiliated in any way. http://www.vgcats.com/comics/
"Operating systems suck: you're better off using only the BIOS" --trainsaw.com
After reading a few comments, I guess we should probably first of all find out what we actually mean when we say "casual gamer".
Someone who spends only a small amount of time per week playing?
Someone who doesn't really care how the game ends as long as it is fun?
Someone who doesn't want to practice but just play?
Someone who doesn't care about the game and what figures he is playing as long as it's fun?
Someone who doesn't care about stats and doesn't want to "build a character" or anything, but just wants to play to pass time?
That needn't be the same. Someone who plays 80 hours a week Windows Solitaire is certainly not building anywhere and plays it to pass time. Someone who only logs in 6 hours a week for two raids in WoW does, but in very little time. Someone who plays an hour of an online beat'em up and practices in between sessions isn't spending a lot of time and doesn't really level up, but he plays the game at a quite dedicated level to become a better player.
So what is a "casual gamer"? Before we discuss whether casual gaming is going to kill "hardcore gaming", we should probably first of all find a working definition for both.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I play Wii (sometimes) and QuakeLive (hardcore)...
The rest can fuck off...
Please, tell me what's new?
I owned over 200 Spectrum games, I completed *exactly* one (Nonterraqueous). If you go by the number of games that can't *be* completed but which I got very, very, very involved in, then you can probably include the Gauntlet series, Chaos, Bruce Lee and Target:Renegade. I pored thousands of hours into games over several years, but only managed to complete less than 1% of them. That *doesn't* necessarily make me a casual gamer, it just means that I got bored of most of the games quite quickly and played something more interesting. If you look through my software libraries of the time, you can see exactly where the most time was spent and there are entire *years* where I didn't play the new games I was buying because I was so busy with the old ones. Does hardcore gamer mean "plays a lot of games", "spends a lot of time playing games", "plays games through to the absolute finish", "plays the newest games" or what? It's such an obscure term it could mean anything, and technically I've been in all those categories for parts of my gaming life.
Casual games *are* played by hardcore gamers, it all depends on what and how you want to do with them. When I bought Half-Life 2, I played it through on Medium difficulty. Why? Life is too short to spend thousands of hours on the extreme levels reloading and reloading to get the perfect 100-health, every objective run. But some people did just that. Does that mean that I'm somehow in the same market as the Wii "wiggle the controller once a minute" crowd, or that I am somehow vastly different from that crowd? No. I actually play things like WiiSports all the time, but also find that you just cannot get a good FPS/strategy on such machines. My most common games to play are the old games I used to own via emulation... does that mean I'm not a "hardcore" gamer? I spent hundreds of hours honing my skills on CS and CS:CZ, does that make me one?
The elements that, to me, make a "hardcore" gamer are:
Time dedicated to the task.
Difficulty of the task to a new player.
Thus, it has *nothing* to do what the actual games that are played. It's like saying that a professional tennis player is a "hardcore sportsman" but that someone who spends every spare moment they have running but doesn't actually compete isn't one. It's really just a matter of dedication.
Just a few categories to jog people's brains but are the following considered "hardcore" gamers or not: NES Speedrun fanatics? Professional Counterstrike players? Dedicated Counterstrike players that don't compete?
So discussing hardcore gamers as something seperate from casual gamers (although we can all pick out the two from our friends without needing a formal definition) is crazy. The game I spent five minutes on might well be considered a "hardcore" game. I've never even *loaded* World of Warcraft... does that make me ineligible? But what about the time and money spent, and the skills gained on a ten-year-old game? That doesn't count?
Hardcore gamers will always want different games to casual gamers. The proportion of each in the world has changed recently, but it doesn't mean *anything* can be predicted from it. For all we know, it might mean that in ten years time *everyone* is a hardcore gamer because they were introduced gradually to games by the casual games and sought out more. Hardcore games won't die while someone wants to pay for them. Casual games won't die while someone wants to pay for them. Discounting actual hardware inadequacies, both types of game can be produced for any hardware. Nothing's going to change.
Shouldn't write about market trends.
Yes, the casual game market is huge, but the hardcore game market hasn't changed at all. While the industry may make some adjustments in the near-term during their period of expansion to meet this previously underserved demand, in the long term there will be just as many "hardcore" games as there were before, because the level of demand is exactly the same as it was before. Suggesting that all developers are going to go casual and in so doing ignore a long-established market (which will in this scenario have absolutely no competition, just like the "casual" market had very little A-list competition when Nintendo launched the Wii) is like saying that car companies are going to sell cars exclusively to China because that's where all the new customers are.
Yes, there will always be a market, but having a billion potential customers instead of "just" millions, makes it a lot more attractive segment.
I fail to see the correlation of a growing population of gamers and many of those being attracted by party games and the death of hardcore games. Maybe it is because you are ignorant enough to think it is the game that makes you hardcore. A new gamer who plays party games in all their spare time is just as hardcore as someone else playing "Ultimate Blood Explosion 3" for the same time.
I'll meet you at the intersection of "Should be" and "Reality"
The problem is that hardcore titles simply can't make enough money to cover the increasing development costs.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
Anyone seriously think movies are going to die?
No. We can only hope...
weirdest thing I ever saw: scientology advertising on slashdot.
Spot the obvious typo at the end - I meant to say don't even want to make casual games, not hardcore games ;)
I don't think it is casual games that are taking control of the gaming scene. What is happening is a change of state in our global society. The people that grew up with the first pcs are now past they're 20s 30s and even 40s. Video games are part of the working force. Kids are now growing up not with an industry in its infancy, but with one that has strong multinational corporations behind them. The computer geek kid is now married and has shown his partener the fun behind gaming. Games are no longer tailored for the boys only. Now were at a point that even those that 10 years ago runned like hell from this type of technologies, are now willing to give it a try and see "what is all the fuzz anyway".
To tell you the truth I think hardcore gaming is only going to get stronger. Why? Simple. Everyone starts as a casual gamer, but as addiction takes hold he becomes a hardcore one. That is already happening. Look at MMOs where wifes, husbands kids instead of watching TV are playing all together online. Casual gaming? It is no longer casual when you pass more than 3 hours playing GTA with your husband.
I can't believe I'm actually seeing the term "hardcore gamer" in a published article. Traditionally, I've seen it used whenever a basement-dwelling, mouth-breathing shut-in needs desperately to feel superior on a Gamefaqs forum. And now there's such a thing as "classic hardcore games"?? What, Castlevania? Mega Man? Strange, because when I was 10 I didn't feel particularly hardcore playing Contra, because, you know, IT WAS JUST A GAME! Hell, I might be considered a "hardcore gamer" now because I built a PC for games; used to be you had to build a custom water-cooling rig. But the bottom line is that the term "hardcore gamer" is silly and meaningless. It's just a way to make playing video games more than other people (probably more than is healthy) seem like dedication instead of idleness.
What Nintendo is doing is making games for a different demographic. Party games aren't new; back in the day we used to call them fighting games. Through my teens and twenties I went to and hosted parties where people would come over with a case of beer and a controller, and we'd fire up Tekken (2 or 3) or Street Fighter (Alpha 4). The difference is that Nintendo is making games that are simple and easy, and that can be played by more than two people at a time on one screen. They're also making non-traditional games, like Brain Age. It's not a question of so-called "hardcore gamers" falling by the wayside, it's a case where games are being designed for non-traditional (i.e., not late teen/early twenties men) demographics.
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because regardless of what many think; and I know many love to put it down either for being a mmorpg or from blizzard; the high end raiders are definitely hard core gamers. The coordination, planning, and discipline, that many demonstrate are as high if not higher than what most people attribute to hard core gaming.
Now, perhaps the real difference is that they are missing... gratuitous violence or lack thereof. Still considering that most of the popular names belong to war or drug related genres and both are extremely violent I really wonder where they base their finding.
Yeah, so the WII sells a lot. Developers are now starting to understand that and you are going to see a rise of violent games hit it.. and most violent games are what people see as belonging to the hard core players
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Is the digital convergance. By that i mean, some people are just hardcore about technology and own a PS3 or Xbox 360 because of the online functionality, movie rentals, dvd/bluray playback, UPnP support that works in hi-def and on top of that a fantastic linup of games.
Its going to be easier for Microsoft and Sony to backtrack and publish "casual" games than it is for Nintendo to frontload a hardware changed or new device to use new technologies.
Thats just my 2 cents. I'm a hardcore nerd. I guess i'd be a hardcore gamer if i had the time. I have absolutely 0 ambition to buy a wii since i don't have the time to play games casually. If i want to play a game i'm going to escape reality, not mimmic it.
I was concerned about this trend for the last few years.
RIP hardcore gaming. It was an awesome time.
No seriously, there are just as many hardcore games as there ever were. It's just that in addition we are getting all this casual crap that you have to filter out.
Get over yourself, people. Slathering yourself all over with the buttery goodness that is the term "hardcore gamer" doesn't make you special, nor does it make you somehow superior to people that invest less time in an escapist hobby like video games. Elitism always seems to run the most rampant in hobbies that don't require genuine talent or skill to excel in. Every goddamn kid these days knows how to play games.
In my day, I spent hundreds of hours playing Quake (and I don't think I've seen anything that matched it), but I no longer have the time, energy, patience, or remaining carpal tunnel capacity to put up with learning some game's 17 inverse lower Egyptian Ninja super power spin moves. Plus, I have little kids and a wife, so unfortunately the spurting gore- and slut-fests are out.
When I get home from a long day at work, I want to blow up easy-to-hit baddies for a while, or walk around in an interesting and well-written environment. I don't want to see "game over" or even be sent back to the "beginning of the level". Better yet, the game should come with a "god mode" accessible from the very beginning--I bought the damn thing, I'll decide how much I'd like to "cheat".
I'm having trouble finding good games like this, but I have plenty of money burning a hole in my pocket if someone can point them out to me. Zelda Wind Waker was not too bad, though really too difficult to be really entertaining. At this point, Lego Star Wars is about as good as I've found.
That's what "casual" is to me. I have a Wii. Game suggestions welcome.
"Not an actor, but he plays one on TV."
the rise of casual gaming means near-certain death for hardcore gaming
Kind of like the rise of 15-second music video snippets mean certain death of hardcore music videos. (Hardcore meaning playing the entire video...remember that? Anyone?)
That's the *Mattel* Power Glove, actually. OK, yes, it was designed for, and mainly used on, the Nintendo Entertainment System, but it was a Mattel product. Not to say that you're claiming otherwise. OK, I'll just shuffle off now.
Adventure games didn't go away; they just went from being one of the biggest genres to a niche genre as the rest of the market expanded and they did not. Hardcore games will do the same thing. The insanely-difficult, insanely-repetitive shooter may be a major genre now, but in 5 years it will be as niche as adventure games are.
Similar reasons, too: the fan base won't grow as fast as the fan base for other games does, and the cost of development is high.
I piss off bigots.
...the rise of casual gaming means near-certain death for hardcore gaming...
Last time I checked, the casual gamers aren't making hardcore gamers disappear.
Niches are more attractive than crowded mainstreams.
This is why there are magazines for speciality interests such as trout fishing, even though the circulation of celebrity gossip magazines is much much higher, and they're much easier to produce. The market segment is way too crowded.
The hardcore gamer group is basically the 18-24 male group... not the biggest segment out there.
Hardcore gaming isn't declining, it's just that casual gaming has really taken off.
"Action without philosophy is a lethal weapon; philosophy without action is worthless."
In other words :
Game type A has N% of gamer market.
A couple of years later, there's a new type of game B comming which attracts N+10% of the market.
Titles : "OMGWTFBBQ!!! There are more people playing B than people playing A ! B is completely killing A, there won't be any A player in a couple of years".
Couple of years later : ...
N% of gamers are still playing A.
N+10% of gamers are still playing B.
and a new game of type C has arrived, and N+20% of gamers are playing it.
Wash, rince, and repeat.
---
You can substitute whatever you want for the letter :
Pen'n'paper RPG.
Computer games.
Console games.
Casual games.
Flash games.
etc.
The only risk is that some stupid high-ranking publisher confuse "category which *most* gamers are playing" with "*only* category which gamers are playing" and thus decide to completely drop the older types of games and concentrate only on the latest fad.
(see how FPS games have eclipsed Point'n'click Adventure games)
On the other hand, as the parent poster said, as long as there's interest, there will be production :
regarding the adventure genre, even if both Sierra and LucasArt completely sacked their adventure game producing divisions,
there are lot of small European companies still producing such games - Funcom, Pendulo, House of Tales, White Birds Productions, etc...
So don't despair, even if the largest studio drop the hardcore games style, other will take the genre and keep producing it. Even if the quantity of hardcore gamers (usually same as before) is suddenly dwarfed by the latest fad du jour.
I mean, there's even still a vibrant community around Interactive Fiction !
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
The concept of "Hardcore" and "Casual" gamers is retarded.
HUUR DUUR I PLAY VIDJA GAIMZ MORE DEN U. I R HARDCOOORE
People that buy a Wii to play Mario Kart and Cooking Mama aren't the same people who want to play Civ IV and Bioshock (Is that even true? I'm made to believe so from the summary).
Why should this strike fear in the hearts of HARDCORE gamers? Dunno... maybe the hardcore games will get less attention/investment/developer's time as there is a growing market for casual games?
http://www.tu4ar.com/ Countdown until MvC2 HD Remix comes out. It's MAHVELLLLLL BAYBEE Just because a game is "Party Friendly" doesn't make it any less hardcore. Take Smash Brothers Melee for example. It's a fun game that anyone can button mash and have a good time with their friends, but at a competative level, there's thousands of players that do 'hardcore' playing of it, that casuals would never dream of. Street Fighter IV just came out and it's the same way. You can flowchart ken all day long (http://www.gossipgamers.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/kenflow.png) or you can take it to tournament level, where people will be figuring out ways to win at the game for years to come.
Here's the problem: I have a Wii, I mostly refuse to buy any games for it beyond light/party games because I'm so tired of trying to play a serious game with my only controls being silly waggles and arm motions that never even correlate to the action.
I'm fine with the easy and loose control for party games, but make a proper controller or use the classic/gamecube controller for those of us who like the console but want a real game experience. I'd like to buy Dead Rising, Madworld, NHL 09, etc. but won't because of the control issue.
It's a self-fulfilling prophecy, if your controls are geared to light/casual games then of course that will prevail.
http://teasphere.wordpress.com - A little spot of tea
Christ people, this is getting repetitive.
"The sales of casual 'party-friendly' games are massively outstripping the sales of classic hardcore games."
Hello? Haven't the sales of "Barbie Party Magic" or "Exxtreme Woodchuck Hunter 3D" *always* outsold 99.999% of what most people would call serious game titles? How is this news?
Look, while the percentage of people who 'game' either on console or PC has skyrocketed, it's still a vanishingly small minority. WoW is the most staggeringly successful online computer game on the planet with what, 12 million subscribers world wide? Wow...0.2% of the population plays!
Sure, everybody wants a multi-million seller, but not every title costs $50 million to make, either. Most businesses would be very pleased with a game that cost $100,000 to develop, and sells 50,000 units. So I'd venture that, far from dying out - ESPECIALLY with the internet's ability to allow people to find their niche-preference - core gamers will always be a niche that there will be a market demand to satisfy.
I'd like to predict the deaths of people predicting the deaths of things, if that wasn't dangerously circular.
-Styopa
I'm sorry, but the article is wrong. Nintendo itself creates very deep, very complex games that take hundreds of hours to master and complete, and people of all ages devour these rich, *hardcore* Wii/DS titles. From Mario Kart Wii to Super Smash Bros. Brawl to the entire Pokemon series, if you don't invest hundreds of hours in the title and put your serious face on while gaming, you're never going to unlock what these titles have in store. And that's just the first party titles! The DS is rife with incredibly deep third-party RPG games that take many, many hours of your life away. Are all these not "hardcore" enough for you?
But if, on the other hand, your definition of "hardcore" is "another bloody multiplayer FPS where you run around, pick up weapons, mash buttons and shoot people/zombies", then, sure, let's call it dead, and good riddance too, because we've all been playing the same game since Doom, and hasn't it grown a little tiring? (Well, I guess the genre's not completely dead, because Wii has The Conduit coming....)
There's no decline in gamers' desire for hardcore games. Look at the success of Fallout 3. The problem is that it's becoming more of pain in the neck for hard core gamers. Yesterday my Xbox360 made a grinding noise that sent my blood pressure up. When you have to treat your system like it's made out of crystal, and when you're constantly fighting with freezes and crashes and hardware failures it spoils some of the fun. A friend of mine had to send away his 360 for repairs, and he hasn't gotten back into Fallout3 yet even though it's been back for a month.
Nintendo makes rock solid hardware- but their games are more casual. So my brother- a hardcore gamer who happens to have a Wii is spending time on World of Goo instead of Fallout, and the other bigger games.
I think we're all just frustrated.
The market shifts to meet demand so that the producers can maximize their profits. When casual gaming burns itself out, demand for hard corps games will be pent up. Someone will release "Uncharted: BioCrysis 8" and it will sell a bizillion copies. Then game companies will be tripping over themselves to sell the most intense, violent, graphic and realistic games again. Until then you will see a decline in those types of games, but not their elimination. The market is too big for hard corps games to die.
1) WoW, while perhaps seeming casual compared to quantum physics or possibly Everquest, is literally orders of magnitude less casual than the least casual console game. How many console gamers spend dozens of hours optimizing their interfaces over the course of years? WoW is more hardcore in the sense that it requires huge amounts of time, skill (to reach high end goals), coordination, and even moderate technical savvy to play. This is in excess of most of the games I've played in the last twenty years. The new expansion was rather easy to complete before the first content patch, but this content patch includes a large number of much more serious challenges. WoW succeeds because it has effectively been targeted at gamers with broadly diverging interests.
2) "Hardcore" gaming was never nearly as popular as poker, yet somehow it came into existence and didn't then disappear for decades now. How could this be? Oh right, relative popularity of dissimilar things is irrelevant.
Yes, the Wii is attracting a lot of casual gamers. No, it's not attracting any significant number of traditional gamers; certainly not at a higher rate than the usual attrition of people who eventually lose interest in gaming. I've seen the 360 and the PS3 lead to people taking breaks from computer gaming before - they at least offer games of somewhat similar style to those on the PC. The only case I know of someone having PC gaming affected by the Wii is a friend who returned to computer gaming after buying a Wii, having fun playing for a month before he decided that the Wii was boring, closeting the Wii and buying himself a video card, which let him get a serious gaming system for only $150.
I've been reading about the death of PC gaming since the early 90s, but the doomsayers always ignore the fact that the number of PC gamers has steadily increased. Regardless of market share, a system with 30 million players (and growing) will still get developer attention.
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
Reading only the summary, it sounds more like a case of casual games flourishing, not hardcore games declining. You might assume the one must be at the expense of the other, but that's not a given.
Having just now read the article, the author just makes the assertion that hardcore is on the wane... there's no evidence offered. Towards the end he says, "Hey! Look! Casual Wii games are hot and no one wants Hardcore Wii games". Well yeah. There are buttloads of crappy Wii games. But it's the crappiness people avoid. Not the hardcoranity. Of course Wii is so big that you can pronounce all of hardcore everywhere in terminal downfall. Give me a break.
He missed probably the most important fact. It's not that the audience for hardcore gaming has shrunk, it's that the casual gaming audience has grown massively.
The hardcore crowd is alive and growing.
And there's nothing more hardcore than spending $250 on peripherals to play a game. That IS hardcore.
They're using their grammar skills there.
Casual 'party-friendly' games are massively outstripping the sales of classic hardcore games because casual 'party-friendly' games are reaching a larger, untapped market.
Hardcore gamers are not switching to casual games. People who normally don't play games because the games are so hardcore are now playing the casual, group-friendly, family-friendly games.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
As long as there are OCD people, egos to feed, and basement dwellers with something to prove, there will be hardcore gamers.
...the article author doesn't.
The resurgence of casual gaming is indelibly tied to the new wave of game peripherals. From chick-friendly sing-alongs to the genre-crossing Guitar Hero,
Sorry guy. Guitar Hero has never been casual. If by "casual" you mean a game that you can play casually for a few minutes/hours here and there and have fun, then basically every decent video game ever made qualifies. There is absolutely nothing casual about truly 'beating' Guitar Hero. Just ask the players who got a legit 5-star performance of Through the Fire and Flames on expert.
A truly casual game is one with no real incentive to ever play more than a few minutes at a time. The Klondike Solitaire that comes with Windows would be a perfect example. The instant the game includes some kind of reward/incentive that requires you to invest significant time blocks or lots of practice it is no longer casual. Now sure, it can still be played casually, but then so can every good video game under the sun. You just have to avoid the non-casual parts.
There is no -1 Disagree mod. Slashdot.org/faq defines mod options. USE IT.
I would argue that casual gaming doesn't mean the end of hardcore gaming, but rather in the run will lead to more hardcore gamers.
People start casually and move to progressively more challenging games. Some of the people who were hardcore become casual as time constraints effect them more.
They compliment each other and aren't mutually exclusive, they go in cycles.
There is NOTHING about WOWs end game raiding that can be considered casual. To be successfully takes a huge time dedication, ditto on PVP.
Shadus
To argue that it is dying is an exaggeration. Sometime in the mid-nineties I heard that the genre of Adventure games was "dying" and that there would be no more demand for these kinds of games in the future, yet now, more than ten years later, not only is the genre still around, it has had a resurgence with the introduction of the NDS.
When the PS2 had just come out, I heard "online games are the future" and that single player, offline games would be dead in a couple years. That also hasn't happened.
In the case of MMORPG, which need a large player base to stay alive, are much more affected by the popularity of casual gaming than console or PC games, which can still have enough success to spawn more. Like Clover, which is now Platinum. Most of the games they make are not tailored towards the mainstream or casual markets, and they typically don't sell as well as more casual or standard fair, but it hasn't really slowed them down. I think there will always be a market and a place for "hardcore" gamers, even if it is eclipsed by Peggle.
Why do you equate "hardcore gaming" with HD graphics? It seems to me that someone primarily concerned with graphics isn't really that into games. For people who really like games, graphics is a secondary concern, gameplay comes first. Megaman 9 for instance is a gamers game. There's nothing there to wow a casual gamer. For those of us who know what's up though, it's a breath of fresh air.
It's kind of like movies. The super produced big budget action packed blockbuster appeals to the general public a lot more than it does to the movie buff. Same thing with games.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
I just read an article the other day about the declining Wii sales in Japan. Wouldn't that say casual gaming is declining? I would think that if Wii sales in Japan are going down and PS3 is going up, there is still hope for the hardcore gamers!
This is something I've been pondering for some time now. What, precisely, is hardcore gaming? Most particularly, I observe that it first became a major "Issue" when Microsoft used the term "Hardcore" to describe he Xbox Live userbase at an E3 several years ago.
At this point, I've come to the conclusion that this fanbase was not actually a hardcore group. They were a bunch of casual gamers who just played the same game (or two) a lot.
Basically, a hardcore gamer is someone who plays all kinds of games. RPGs, First Person Shooters, Plaformers, Action/Adventure, Strategy, Fighting, etc. The way Microsoft defined this "Hardcore" userbasee is inaccurate (if you ask me, anyway), as this userbase primarily just plays shooters, and not much else. This, mixed with he aging demographic of gamers, led to "hardcore" games being boiled down to gory shooters, and very little else.
So yes, casual party games may spell the end for gory shooters. But that's because casual games have a certain attraction, particularly for people like me. I used to be really into gaming, but now adays, I almost never pick up a controller without someone else being around. Part of it is a genuine lack of interest in playing most console games (because "Hardcore" became that gory first person shooter, instead of any good game with depth to it), and most of it is having a god damned life. Once you have other things to do (such has hanging out with friends and table topping, playing guitar, working, classes, etc.) gaming becomes a more boring form of entrainment. Almost all of the games directed at the "Hardcore" crowd are first person shooters that all play the same, and eventually it becomes a matter of simply ignoring such things.
The only truly satisfying game that I've experienced in a long time is Rock Band 2. It's got that difficulty, but it's also great for pick up and play by yourself and with friends. My personal opinion is that game developers need to stop trying to separate "Hardcore" from casual, because the results of interleaving the two can be pretty damn good.
Because many people declare the HD consoles as hardcore and the Wii as casual. My personal definition of hardcore doesn't match that either but when people argue about "destroying gaming" those are the definitions that come into play. It's not really possible to argue what'll happen and what not if we can't even use the same words. The business terminology is core and new market with the core being pretty much everything from the last gen and anything that's just an incremential improvement of last gen stuff while the new market is the market the Wii branched out into.
These days people declare themselves hardcore after playing Halo and GTA, that's the kind of hardcore that'll suffer.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
I love video games, and I've played them since I was a kid. But most "real" games have two big problems:
1. You need to play for hours at a time in order to make any progress.
2. They're designed to be frustrating. Fight some boss or do some level, then die, then do it again, sometimes a dozen times or more. That's the whole point of these games, to force you to push yourself and bang your head against a wall in order to beat them.
Once I started seeing this pattern in "gamers" games, I got tired of them very quickly. I'm all for new experiences that aren't based upon time and frustration.
Show me the reason you need to buy gold.
There are plenty of reasons in that other article. One is that gold will remain useful for bartering long after the United States dollar crumbles.
Oh, you meant "gold" in World of Warcraft. That'd be like buying bells in Animal Crossing.
That the hardcore game today is the casual gamer of tomorrow.
Life gets in the way, there's work, girls/wife, kids, etc.
For Christ sake, look at Maslow's Pyramid and make sense of it.
The dudes that are stuck playing SFII turbo (and all its derivatives) 16 years later or playing Counterstrike clones are just stuck in a loop just like the 40 year old dude who still thinks he's a senior in high school.
The market these days is bigger than ever. Casual games are expanding the market into new areas, not just cannibalizing existing sales. Look at the car market. There will always be a demand for tiny, minimum cost vehicles. There will be a demand for kid wagons, be it the station wagon, the minivan that replaced it, or the giant dickwad SUV's that came after that. Traditionally sports cars were the dickwad vehicle of choice. People who had the need for a kid wagon but wanted to assert their dickwaddishness got an SUV and satisfied both needs. The station wagon had a bit of a die-off but that was only one way of satisfying the need for a family vehicle. Now that SUV's are on the decline, the latest fad term is crossover vehicle. Sorry, when I hear crossover I think of interstate accidents, "crossed the median and had a head-on collision, killing a family of four."
In today's games market, we are seeing many competing trends. Years back we heard that the shooter was killing the adventure game. Haven't seen too many of them out there recently. But this just means the market is open for the next great adventure game. Someone comes out with that and will make a hit and you'll see a dozen clones the following year. We heard that the consoles were killing computer gaming but not quite. Big budget computer gaming has taken a hit but there's still a market for people who drop $5000 on their electronic penises. But there's still money to be made in computer gaming, just look at how well Steam is doing. What's more accurate to say is that it's the death of the computer game store -- you hardly see any PC games in EB these days, it's all about the consoles.
The other thing everyone was pissing and moaning about is that AAA titles would cost $20 mil and up and everyone would go bankrupt. However, we're seeing low-budget games selling well on the consoles. This can be analogized to movies. We'll watch quirky indie comedies made for $20k and we'll watch the next big action flick made for $200 mil. The existence of one doesn't push out the other.
If anything, I would say that the expanding market will provide more niche opportunities. Back in the 50's, I Love Lucy was watched by what, half the nation? Today's top shows don't have anywhere near those kinds of numbers but the networks are doing just fine. I don't think any future game series will have the same hold on the market like Mario on the NES but I don't think anybody is crying over how GTAIV did.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
... go and do your casual crap games. Do in just for the money. And see where you end.
Meanwhile, I'll be doing games for those that you forgot about, and for the pure fun of doing what I love. And hey, I even know how to still live from it. (Pretty easy actually.)
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
The market for hardcore games is still there, and always will be - we'll probably just define it a little more honestly than hardcore games - maybe young men's games, or something like that, and it will no longer dominate games media coverage.
I mean, GTA is a "hardcore game" and some even call it mature, which is like saying a Van Dam movie is mature. I can't say I agree to that.
I further predict that there will be a new market for more traditional kinds of games that really are mature. Movies went through this same kind of transition early on. We're a ways off in games yet though.
http://www.unfocus.com/
Better use of user generated content should do a lot to keep the hardcore gamers busy.
Not a real gamer myself but from just a quick browse around gamestop the market seems saturated with what people would consider 'hardcore' titles.
How many hours can one waste in a day?
love is just extroverted narcissism
If you can believe vgchartz.com there are 51 million hardcore consoles (PS3, Xbox360) around, while "only" 49 million casual gamer consoles (Wii). Seems to me to be an even match, not exactly what I would call death of hardcore gaming.
The "Why do X when Y makes so much money," is a false argument. I mean if we followed that logic, there would be nothing but fantasy MMOs coming to market. Why? Because WoW makes more than any other game ever (because of it's large sales combined with monthly fee). However that's not the case. If everyone did in fact make games like WoW, they'd all suffer for it. There are only so many people who are interested in that sort of thing, and those people are only going to play so many games each. If there were 100 games in the same style (and of the same quality) as WoW it isn't as though each of the 10,000,000 WoW players would play all of them. Rather that market would fragment and each game would get a much smaller piece.
The same is true with regards to casual vs hardcore. There may be a larger casual market, but that doesn't mean there isn't also a hardcore market. If there's a lot of competition in the casual arena, and there is, then one way to deal with that is to make a hardcore game. No, your market isn't as big, but then you have less people to compete with and thus you get a larger share of what market there is.
There isn't a type of gamer out there, there are many. Thus there's room for lots of different kinds of games. As an example many people claim that real time strategy games killed turn based. Well, it's true, the RTS motif appeals to more people and thus we see more games like that but turn based is dead? Not hardly. Civilization 4 sold a ton of copies, enough to spawn two expansions, and then Colonization, a similar style game about American colonial times.
So while I imagine casual games will dominate, that doesn't mean harder core games are going anywhere. Companies don't just all pile on the current hot thing. There are plenty that make a living producing for more niche markets.
It is scalable. It is a game that can be fun for casual gamers, fun more more hardcore gamers. It offers things like these high end dungeons, but does not require it. So if all you want to do is roam around killing monsters and slowly level, it has plenty of that. IF you want to power game and raid with friends, it has that. If you want to beat up other players, it has that. If you want to never be beaten up by other players, it has that too. You choose your play style and level of commitment, and WoW generally has something for you to do.
There is a simple fact that unless an executive is stupid, deranged or seriously in love with their own ideas, development money follows revenue money. That is, they're going to sink in money into more of whatever is earning them profits this time around. That's why we get sequels and copies of popular games. But it can also appeal to whole categories or qualities of games as well, and if revenue money is coming from casual games, most game companies are going to read the writing on the wall and go with it. Or else we'll have Darwinian selection at work and get the same result the hard way.
My own feeling is that as casual games start producing increasing amounts of profits or games that are friendly to a casual audience such as World of Warcraft (and yes, everything short of the endgame is very casual-friendly), then we are going to see development money be sunk into casual or casual-friendly games. I have little doubt that Blizzard is going to make sure that Diablo III is as easy as possible for casual gamers to pick up and play. Diablo and Diablo II were very simple point and click games on a fundamental level. There's a reason WoW has done so well.
The flip side of that is that as hardcore games start declining in terms of revenue, the development money is going to go out of them (as well as the marketing money, but that's just part of investment costs). That's probably going to produce a vicious circle in terms of the hardcore gaming industry. Not that it is going to die, but we're going to see a definite decline in AAA high development budget high marketing budget games. The money for the AAA blockbusters will be aiming at the much larger market of casual gamers of various sorts.
In the end, no gaming market will truly die off as long as there are developers willing to code what they want to play. And the existence of online gaming stores is going to make it easier for indie developers to put out small games. But my own feeling is that most of those gaming stores will be pushing the casual games and there's going to be a small section of the store with the label 'hardcore' on it catering to a smaller niche of gamers.
hardcore gaming won't die off casual gamers aren't going to slam down $400+ for the latest and greatest console then another $60 per game nintendo has casual gamers because they stopped fighting the latest and greatest fight the wii is nothing more than a game cube with a facelift and you stand to make more profit doing a high wend hardcore game than you do making another party game to sell for $20 beside the other 50 that came out today
when final fantasy, legend of zelda, mario, metroid, elder scrolls, fallout, halo, call of duty, medal of honor and dozens of other HUGELY popular series all terminate because no one bought the latest game maybe i'll listen
maybe some good will come of it and the industry will finally crash again making developers actually come up with an origional idea rather than another FPS
While companies may be catering more to the "casual" gamer more than they once did, most companies are still very much focusing on the "hardcore" crowd. Look at the Wii's catalogue of games, and then compare it to the size of the PS3 or 360 catalogue of games. People may be buying more Wiis than they are the 360 or PS3, but people are buying more GAMES for the PS3 or 360 on a per person basis and that's what third party developers are looking for. They couldn't care less what console sells more, they care which console gets them more game sales. Don't get me wrong, third party developers are definitely putting out more "casual" games; but those casual games aren't going to completely replace developer's games or even (I think) be the main focus of big developers as the casual market spends less on games and purchases fewer games. Many casual Wii owners are quite happy to own Wii Sports and purchase nothing else; 3rd party developers aren't going to focus on these individuals.
Can I get in on this gig? "Particles have free will!" "9/11 was an inside job!" "Obama is a Marxist/Facist/Muslim/Alien Overlord!"
So where's my money already?
So, I'm a fan of progressive rock. Progressive rock was very popular in the 70s, with bands like Yes, ELP, Pink Floyd, ect, ect. You could say that Progressive Rock is analogous to hardcore games in that the music is often serious and requires a lot of time to listen to.
Progressive Rock isn't as popular today as it was in the 70s, yet there are plenty of new Progressive Rock bands. Instead of selling out stadiums, they sell out smaller venues that only hold a couple of thousand fans.
Trust me when I say this: Going to a sell-out show that has a couple thousand fans is a lot more fun then a stadium show.
As a result of the (*cough*) decline (*cough*) of hardcore gaming; I would expect that, within a few years, a few *excellent* studios cater to the hardcore crowd by producing *excellent* hardcore games. There's a lot to look forward to once the casual crowd has something to keep them distracted.
No, I will not work for your startup
... has become totally meaningless.
I rememeber back in the day I used to play a lot of games, truth be told being a 'hardcore' just meant being INTO certain games, or certain genre's that were considered 'real' games vs. one's made for casuals gamers that no one ever rented.
Games like Chrono trigger, final fantsay, etc, all the popular titles were 'hardcore'. I really dislike this whole idea that games are now 'casual', the way old gamers use hardcore is to talk about certain games and genre's and the types of gamers that play them.
Truth be told the casual vs hardcore distinction has become so bastardized with umpteen hundred definitions it has become almost meaningless.
A casual player is not someone who plays popular or hardcore genre (First person shooters).
A casual gamer has always been someone who plays cheap flash games and not much in the way of console or PC games, that is the 'true' definition of casual. Anyone who plays the big games on PC or consoles is by definition a 'hardcore' gamer, since they are playing big budget titles.
Nah, the closest I ever got was a Thrustmaster FCS. The only realistic flight sim I played regularly was Falcon 3. Too much "real" in a game usually sucks the fun out. Mechwarrior and wing commander/xwing/descent games were more my thing.
I also mentioned FPS/RPGs which aren't exactly a niche market, but thanks for teaching me a new word.
--- Do you believe in the day?
MS has always been a me-too company, and well Sony is just Sony. There isn't much to say about both of them trying to edge in on Nintendo's territory. I don't think casual gamers are going to buy more than one console. It's just not going to happen, and Nintendo is the casual brand now, I think that was inevitable considering their place in pop culture. Trust me the 360 is a success because of its audience, and if MS alienates the audience they worked so hard so hard to cultivate, it will not end well.