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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Aside from the vastly outdated Atari 2600 in my basement as a child I was first exposed to gaming in the form of Super Mario Bros., Duck Hunt, and Metroid.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.
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.
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.
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)
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
(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.
..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 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.
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.
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.
Yet, the most originality appears to be happening among the so-called "casual" games, while the "hardcore" are mostly endless re-iterations of the same thing.
... and then they built the supercollider.
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 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"
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."
I don't have any stats, but I'd like to see how the WII is faring now days. When it first came out, it was the next "Tickle Me Elmo"--you couldn't get one, short of camping out in front of the store. Now stores have more than they can sell. I guess enough people bought one to realize the gimmick wears off quickly, and the games pretty much suck, relative to the same offerings on Xbox or PS, or PC even.
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.
Or they just started making more of them, perhaps? The Wii still tops the sales charts in the UK, at least, and according to this site, sold more in the US in Feb 2009 than the 360 and PS3 COMBINED.
http://forum.pcvsconsole.com/viewthread.php?tid=11067
Looks like you're gonna need a new theory!
Except you're forgetting one thing - that gimmick lasted for about 2 years. Nintendo's stock fell in April because the sales of the Wii dropped for the first time in 14 months, and it's currently the 4th best selling console all time behind PS2, PS, and NES.
I agree that the graphics aren't as nice as the other platforms, but I think that Wii's target audience and purpose is different - they are after the casual/family gamer and part of the appeal to that crowd is the game interface a la the Wii Remote.
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!
...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.
The Wiis also top the resale charts on Craigslist, Kijiji, etc. once the novelty wears off and they discover there's very few games worth buying.
body massage!