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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.
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!
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.
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.
20 hours a week is not casual gaming.
20 hours is two 5 hour sessions on the week-end and 3, 3 hours raiding sessions.
(you make up the extra hour logging on every day to check and relist stuff in the AH. Sorry, Auction house...)
Not casual.
Pulling out the Wii fit and having a bash once a week is casual.
You CAN be a casual gamer and spend 20 hours a week, you just need to put that new title down after you finish it and not have a need for another one immediately after.
(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.
The issue is not that you HAVE to buy gold. You don't. You are correct that dailies can get you a heap of cash, quickly.
Casual players do not play dailies that often. Why? Because they want to play stuff they haven't seen or done and dailies=grinding. I bought gold simply because I wanted to get a full frostweave set and worked out it would take me two months of playing at my normal rate to gather the materials. (then they nerfed it!)
So I simply bought gold to quarter the time. I used the rest of my time to play the game and not grind. I buy gold to play content, not save up for it.
(gold is about $13US for 1000, so I consider working for one hour a better proposition than grinding for 20)
I always accepted that I would be behind hardcore players in skill and in equipment.
To get back to my point, what you are demonstrating is commitment to the game.
If you grind for cash, you are not casual.
If you consistently play over years (or even months) in arenas, you are not casual.
Time is one indicator, commitment is another. You may be borderline in time spent, but your commitment makes you not casual.
You are NOT a casual player. I am not judging if that is a good or bad thing, perhaps it is better than going to bars and picking up diseases? It still doesn't change the fact that you are NOT a casual player.
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