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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...
"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!
To the young'uns, these newfangled games have even more drawing power than Mario or Metroid ever did for us. Not only are they more shinny, but they also include Trendy Animated Character Du Jour, which kids have been getting trained to love for years before the video game tie-in is even made.
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.
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.
Just because the PS3 outsold the Wii for 1 out of 16 months (in one country), doesn't mean that only the hardcore players are left to buy peripherals and software. There are still substantially more Wii owners out there than any of the other consoles, and some of those people are still buying new accessories.
And given that you are obviously a hardcore player (who are apparently now in the minority), your personal preference of which console you use cannot have any bearing on this discussion because you cannot extrapolate it to all other gamers.
(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.
You mean Mario Galaxy, Wii Play (Duck Hunt+) and Metroid Prime 3? To be honest, I think Nintendo is the only one who has stuck to what they're good at: Making good games.
Or maybe it has to do with there being no major Wii game releases in several months? Yes, there was Wii Music but that fell pretty flat (can't have a smash hit every single time) and didn't really sell systems. The release drought on the Wii simply prevented the Wii from increasing in appeal in that period of time and thus sales slowed down as the number of appealed-to-but-not-sold-to people ran low. This has nothing to do with "casual" gamers losing interest and everything to do with there simply being no games for them to be interested in.
If you want anecdotes here's mine: When the Wii drought kept going for too long I bought a 360 (it was fairly cheap, 200€ for the 60GB Pro, down from 240€) to expand the library I can buy titles from. Because I couldn't find anything interesting on the shelves I got some points for XBLA and my first game on this brand new HD gaming system was a port of a Playstation 1 game that I bought because I liked the sequels on the handhelds (CvSotN), now capable of displaying its 320x240 graphics in glorious HD. Maybe it's the way demos are set up on the system but only one of the six retail games I bought had a demo, most of the demos I played ended up repelling me from the game. By now I've really enjoyed two retail games on the system and liked three downloadable games quite a bit, I've still spent 30€ less on games than the console itself. Played the games I liked to the exhaustion point (either the ending or where they got boring) and now the thing's collecting metaphorical dust. It simply has a total lack of games, anything good is available on the PC as well and costs 20€ less there (with much faster pricedrops so even bigger savings if you wait for the bargain bin). I'm sure someone would be inclined to point at Gears of War now but guess what, they didn't even release that in this country (because reducing the violence would mean "compromising their artistic vision", whatever the vision behind a game about space marines chainsawing alien dinosaurs is*...). Meanwhile my Wii kept accumulating games, both retail and downloadable despite being in a release drought (WiiWare wasn't in a drought and many older retail games kept falling into the bargain bins).
*=Speaking of space marines chainsawing alien dinosaurs, Dawn of War 2 got a 16 rating, Gears of War was apparetly too violent even for an 18 rating. Seriously, a freaking Warhammer 40k game passed as 16 without any censoring and they can't get Gears of War into a sane range?
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
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
I agree. I own a PS3 and a Wii (alongside many other consoles, from the Atari 2600 upwards), and I seriously think that Mario Kart Wii is one of the most temple-throbbingly diabolic games that's ever existed. It's worse than NetHack for actively wanting you to fail.
It's referred to as Sweario Kart in our household, and I recently discovered that the Wii Wheel is rather more aerodynamic than you'd think after I was blue shelled on the finish line during an online race.
I'm not allowed to play it when my wife's at home anymore. :(
"Proudly Posting Without Reading The Article"
I suppose that could have some truth. otoh, the enjoyment in playing games while growing up with hasn't been surpassed by the new shinier things, even though I also was dragged in the 90s with the "upgrade to the next graphics card for more shinyness", always coming closer to "more reality", "better FPS", I've been there...
I've played through the NFS titles, enjoyed how they evolved, got better, more realistic, but I never spent as much time on any title as NFS2. Same with GTA. Halflife is something else though, the submerging in HF2 was amazing for the few weekends I've spent on it.
It's hard to tell, for me, wherever it's "nostalgia", the own reference and gameindustry playing on it. (remember the gameboy & tetris hype? Donkey Kong handhelds? Arcades even?) Today, my time is more limited, the context and stories of the games have changed which change the gameplay, and somehow I stopped caring for "better graphics", I was excited about DOOM3, before it came out, but soon the next-gen DirectX games came out and the novelty was lost. Maybe it's context, personal frame of refence (up from a fex pixel on a screen to DukeNukem was a very exciting improvement in 'graphics', today, the bottom standard is pretty high compared to the age where buying a 32mb RAM module would give you a smoother and more "detailed" experience), I don't know. I've stopped gaming because I work more then I have free time, so I make good use of my free time living in the real world as most of my professional life is behind a screen writing virtual things.
I think we can keep recursing like this until someone returns 1
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!