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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.
Aside from the vastly outdated Atari 2600 in my basement as a child I was first exposed to gaming in the form of Super Mario Bros., Duck Hunt, and Metroid.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.
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
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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.
I was a casual gamer who didn't buy gold and yet I enjoyed the game immensely. It's not that hard to make money in the game if you do a bit of research. I played no more than 20 hours a week and yet when I quit I had about 4000 gold at level 66.
20 hours a week is a lot of time. Is that really casual? If you said you played a sport for 20 hours a week would you call that casual? "I play baseball casually 20 hours a week". Sounds hardcore to me as it's quite an investment.
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.
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.
No more than 20 hours a week, huh?
I spent less time per week earning my degree!
Show me the reason you need to buy gold.
I am decidedly in the 'avid' category for WoW (I'm not sure I'd say 'hardcore'), since I average 15-20 hours per week. So I'm not representative. Neither are my friends, who all have over 2000 hours of playtime over the last 4 years.
That said, you can easily make 100g in a single hour. Icecrown dailies run ~13g each, and they take less than 5 minutes in most cases. Then there's WG, which is pretty much a guaranteed 40-50g in 30 minutes or less (typically more like 20 on my server).
So, yeah, at that rate, I don't see why anyone would need to buy gold. One hour a day for a month and a half and you have 5000g.
Now, if you want to argue that your time is worth more than the cost of the gold, that's possibly a decent argument. But it's not like the game is making it hard. There are plenty of casual WoW players who get their gold through quests and dailies, and they have access to the same stuff as everyone else - it just takes a bit longer.
It's not like you can buy good gear with gold anyway. Gold is basically for augments (enchants/inscriptions/thread/etc.), gems, and misc items like repairs, mounts, and respeccing.
To tell the truth, no multi-player game truly is. Either it's too easy/random (e.g. MarioKart Wii) or it's too challenging. Games that are too easy/random aren't rewarding long-term because there's little opportunity to improve. Games that are too challenging make it difficult for casual players to play.
You, as a casual player, are never going to beat my 2v2 team. We're not exactly "hot shit", but we just missed Deulist last season, which means that we are better than 97% of the arena teams in the game. You need to invest a significant amount of time and practice to get into the top 3%; we played over 600 games in Season 5 alone, and we've already played over 150 games in Season 6 (which started 3 days ago).
There are three options if you're a casual player. You can accept that you're not going to compete with hardcore (or even semi-hardcore) gamers and have fun. You can become a hardcore or semi-hardcore gamer. Or you can stop playing the game because you realize that it doesn't matter.
Buying gold (or even a character) isn't one of those options. It doesn't make you a better player, it doesn't really get you better gear, and it's not going to enable you to compete with hardcore gamers. To put it bluntly, it's blatantly obvious who belongs in high-end raid content and who doesn't. And it's just as obvious who bought their characters in arenas or BGs. Skill is not something that you can buy, and despite popular opinions, skill still plays a major role in WoW. The first season I ever played arenas seriously (Season 2), we ended at 1690. In Season 3 we ended at 1776. In Season 4 we ended at 1840. Despite the challenges in Season 5 (DK/Holy Paladins, Hunters), we still ended at 1940. And in Season 6 our MMR is already above 2100 (albeit largely because of balance changes).
Sidenote: For anyone who claims I play too much WoW, consider this: how much time do you spend watching TV every week? I spend about 2.5 hours per day on WoW, which is about as much time as the average American spends watching TV. I can't argue that playing WoW is a 'better' use of my time than watching TV, but I do find it more enjoyable than watching TV.
They're more profitable for the hits, but I doubt that they're all that much more profitable per game. If every game maker decided to make only casual games, the market would become flooded and it would be harder to make a profitable game. How many different games is a casual gamer going to play through the year?
Take Stardock, for example. They saw the opportunity created by game companies moving to making console games because the market was bigger and they could get better copy protection. They've been making money hand over fist because they recognized that the PC market was alive and well and nearly vacant, despite the articles about PC gaming dying. The games they make are hardcore games that are also old school and dependable. They're not spectacular, but they know their audience and they serve the hell out of it.
So, if casual gaming ever eclipses hardcore gaming to the extent that computer gaming eclipses pen and paper, there will still be companies like Stardock that serve the market. Hardcore gamers will never disappear, and companies that are looking to make millions upon billions of dollars probably won't serve them, but companies that recognize the potential and have talent and a passion for gaming will still serve it.
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.
I'm not a console gamer at all but do play on the PC. My wife and I were at a friends house a week or two ago and they have a Wii. One of their friends came over and brought two additional controllers (so there were four). We bowled and played a bit of the other games that night. The next day my wife was on Craigslist looking for a used Wii :)
[John]
Shit better not happen!
Most people who take heroin never get addicted, and those who do would probably get hooked on something else if heroin wasn't around. That doesn't make heroin a "light" drug.
Property is theft.
Exactly. I knew a Very Smart guy who has a full scholarship to engineering school. Dropped/failed out due to playing everquest and not showing up for exams.
But before that, in high school, he would memorize D&D books, and sit in front of anime all the time. He could tell you the HP of every creature in the Monster Manual, but got caught cheating by saving physics formulas in his calculator.
Non-chemical addiction is often a personal problem, not a problem with the entertainment they spend all their time with.
My biggest problem with WOW are the gratuitous time sinks Blizz has built into it. Quest chains where you have to travel across the continent just to talk to someone that suck up 10 or so minutes, action bars that are just there to burn time (e.g. fishing), painfully slow reputation grinds that aren't a challenge skillwise just matters of endurance, etc. You can spend many evenings in raids and walk out of them all empty handed simply because of a random number generator.
It's saving grace is that they do have an emblem system to toss folks a bone if they try many runs and are still getting shortchanged. The quests are also relatively simple to solo most of the time so you don't have to stand around begging for help. There are also some pretty inventive and fun quests and instances that keep the game fun.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning