Slashdot Mirror
Struggling To Bridge the Casual-Hardcore Game Gap
With the advent of the Wii and the upcoming motion control systems from Sony and Microsoft, console makers are expanding the gaming population to include vast numbers of casual players. Their problem now, according to this editorial at Eurogamer, is that there doesn't exist a broad selection of games between the simple, introductory titles and the complex, hardcore ones, which tends to limit how deep new players will venture into the gaming ecosystem. Quoting:
"... it needs software that spans the gap between the two camps of offerings which are emerging on Xbox 360 — games that encourage players of Dance Central or Your Shape to move upstream and explore. It's unlikely, perhaps, that they'll ever end up curb-stomping crinkle-faced nasties in Cliff Bleszinski's latest, but we're a long way past the point of the Xbox being all about shooting and driving, even if the public perception hasn't quite moved with the software line-up. The long-term challenge for the games market must, ultimately, be to emulate the success which other mediums have had in creating markets where consumers routinely and happily move between genres, and where franchises which would be pigeonholed as 'hardcore' in the games world nestle comfortably in people's DVD collections alongside those which would be dismissed as 'casual.'"
to Tetris?
... casual gamers just aren't that interested in gaming to begin with? There doesn't need to be more "intermediate" games where casuals "graduate up" the gaming ladder. The truth is you are either invested in games or you are not, period.
Quite frankly I see this whole casual craze as a bubble that's going to pop.
The gap is permanent. As a casual gamer I know this because once in a while when I try to play some "advanced" game I find that just learning the rules and controls takes more time than I meant to spend playing the game, so I give up and go back to a simpler game I already know. We don't all have the time to devote to "advanced gaming", you know... Even when I was a kid I didn't have that kind of time available for such frivolity. Work, work, work!
Caveat Utilitor
prettify Dwarf Fortress a bit and convert the learning brick-wall or north-face-of-death into something more resembling lush rolling hills and you'd have something, nay?
How long is long past? Maybe I'm just not paying enough attention and part of the unwashed masses, but after I bought an Xbox 360 last year to play rock band 2 I decided to search out some games to retroactively justify purchasing the console for one game. I have purchased no other games since. The only games available seem to consist mainly of FPS/3rd person shooters (which I'm not interested in playing outside of a PC environment) and driving games that I was never interested in. There's a handful of RPGs that I might be interested in I suppose, but those are often available on the PC as well and I kind of lack the time to play them these days.
Again, maybe some one deeper into console games can enlighten me...but my piece of the public perception is that the Xbox is still all about shooting and driving.
It has easy control (swing the remote) and easy gameplay, but solving the puzzles can be as challenging as a hardcore RPG. With a little more thought I could probably think of other "medium" difficulty games. Maybe Metroid Prime. Or one of the many Sonics.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
About transitioning people from Monopoly to Settlers of Cataan to Dungeons and Dragons to tabletop gaming?
from the need-more-retro-mega-man-titles
There is a great selection of "intermediate" titles for the Wii... especially if you browse the virtual console titles (most of which are under $10).
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Now the people that are playing "casual" games would much prefer watching TV over gaming. Those people will never be able to be converted to a more involved type of game.
Look at all the people that play Farmville. My wife even got into it and she HATES video games. And after a short time she bailed on it. Why? because she doesn't want to invest time into a useless endeavor.
Give her something more complex that might not be a "waste of time" and she gets frustrated because she wants a zero learning curve. Zero learning curve tends to mean something less then advanced. It's an evil little circle that might be impossible to overcome.
The untapped market will more likely than not remain untapped.
Fear Is the Only God
From most casual to hardcore:
Farmville, Mafia Wars
Plants vs. Zombies, Bejeweled, Tetris
Wii Sports, Cooking Mama
Mario games, racing and sports games
Serious Sam, Diablo
Assassins Creed, Halo
GTA, Rainbow Six
Dragon Age, Total War series
Where's the gap?
That's like bridging the gap between coffee and coke. It's like bridging the gap between whiskey and wine. You are only going to create some crap that no one likes.
What needs to die is this attitude that what we need to do is make games that appeal to everyone, so that every person in the population buys it. That's stupid. It's chasing an impossible dream. You are far better off just making a good game that a certain set of people like. You can't appeal to everyone, so pick a genre, "casual", "hardcore" or whatever, and make something good in that genre. You aren't going to make a game that appeals to both grandma and Twitchy McFragerton, so stop trying. You're just going to end up with some crap that both grandma and Twitchy agree is worthless.
The cake is a pie
"Sir, we absolutely cannot allow a casual-hardcore gap!"
"MEIN FURHER! I CAN WALK!"
Why the push into "hardcore" games for so-called "casual" gamers? I'm guessing because "hardcore" games generally cost more than "casual" (i.e. non) games. Casual games generally don't cost more than 30 USD (e.g. most Wii titles). A lot of them are actually free. "Hardcore" games like Gears of War and GTA generally cost 60 USD, twice the price.
Freedom is drinking a beer in the park when you're supposed to be at work.
See part of the problem is that I don't think there are two kinds of gamers. There seems to be this perception that everyone is either casual or hardcore. Casual gamers don't play games often, only play simple games, and so on. Hardcore gamers then spend all their time playing games, and play games as complex as they come.
That is way over simplified. How complex someone likes a game and how much they game are not linked. There are people who play casual games all the damn time, and there are people who love complex games but only can play occasionally.
Also, some people just need to be eased in to things. WoW is a great example. At the high end, it is a rather complex game. There is a lot to it. However when you start, it is simple as can be. You have a total of like 2 abilities, there's a friendly person with a big gold ! over their head to give you your first job, and your job is to go beat up some things that are right next to you. It is simple to get in to, gives you as much time as you like to figure things out, etc. It then slowly ramps things up as you play. You gin more abilities, your world becomes larger, your tasks more complex, more options become available, etc.
Seems to work well to the tune of 12 million subscribers. To be sure, there are plenty of "hardcore" types for whom the easy introduction was an annoyance. However, I know more than a few people who were not gamers, or didn't do MMOs that got in to WoW. The easy, fun, start was what it took to ease them in to the world.
So I think intermediate games are a great idea. Not just to try and "graduate" people, but because some people may just want more complexity than offered by casual games, but not so much as offered by some of the really complex ones out there. An example would be something like Civ Revolutions. Civ 4 is a great game, one of my favourite. However the thing is amazingly complex. You have so much data in that game, so much to consider, so much to look after. It is just more than some people can handle, even in a non realtime format. That doesn't mean they might not enjoy a game like that, just means a more simplified version could be good, hence Civ Rev, which did quite well.
I thought FPS formed the bridge between casual and hardcore. Granted, if you suck you might get bummed playing against more skilled players sometimes, but the thing I like about them is a lot of the 'skill' (twitch mostly, a few strategies help, and knowing/learning maps) is portable across different FPS games. I used to be what we'd consider a hardcore player, wasting hours every week, but I have other interests and other things to do. So I've kept playing various FPS games with an understanding that I can usually play at least moderately well, even for short periods of time, and enjoy it.
Quack, quack.
This article is a load of crap. "Hardcore" games virtually don't exist any more (in the major publisher marjet) and are especially missing from consoles. Frat boys who play Madden and Halo aren't "hardcore" gamers* and aren't playing "hardcore" games**. If they mean the "bored housewife or grandmother who can't handle a game more complex than pacman" market they should just say so. Console games have been dumbed down and simplified for almost a decade now to appeal to the "broader" market. If someone can't get into your average console game they are either not very interested in games or stupid (remember a large portion of the public is on the wrong side of the bell curve).
Calling modern console games "hardcore" is like calling Michael Bay films "intellectually stimulating".
* An average SNES game would be unbeatable to the vast majority of modern gamers.
** FPSs have been slipping in difficulty for so many years that even on the highest difficulty I rarely find myself challenged and I am not greatly skilled at them.
========
CINC, 4th Penguin Legion
(..) when I try to play some "advanced" game I find that just learning the rules and controls takes more time than I meant to spend playing the game, so I give up and go back to a simpler game I already know.
Replace "game" with "application", "operating system", "user interface" or any (non-software) "tool", and IMHO that claim still holds. I hope that software developers realize this; if casual users are to use/enjoy your product, then it:
This is exactly what makes eg. Ubuntu into such a popular Linux distro: throw it on a machine, and most of the time everything works out of the box, and default settings & looks are useable / bearable / easy to understand (or a few important settings are easy to find using the GUI). Linux distro's where this isn't the case can still be good, but because of this not for casual or newbie users. Which cuts potential user group right there.
The key to make a game appeal to both types of gamers is to include elements such as 'rubberband AI' (In Mario Kart, CPU speed was adjusted by player position; items get better as you fall behind) and difficulty levels (imagine that!), choices, or chaos (The Super Smash Bros series can turn a near-win into a loss or a tie through items or stage elements). Super Mario Galaxy 2 allows players to choose between easy, doable and brutally difficult Stars. Frequent checkpoints and lives ensure that the challenge is painless for those who wish to undertake it. Since you only need 60 or so to win, the challenge is self-adjusted. Unfortunately, as games have become more complex, tweaking hardness is nigh impossible without losing balance or frustrating players; this is a brilliant little strategy that leaves all players fulfilled. Now, 'casual' games made in 5 minutes are a different story....
Megaman is a perfect example. Nobody who has beaten half the Megaman games is going to be called anything less than 'hard core', but its easy enough to pick up any of them and start playing with no instructions at all.
Then I stopped playing.
I guess I grew up. Or something.
I've always felt like a gamer at heart, but I came to realize that even though games are looking prettier and prettier, they are feeling rather empty. Maybe it was just the thrill of being a kid discovering new worlds that hooked me, and now that I'm an adult I don't have the time to be sucked in anymore. I certainly don't have the time to play games all day.
Until the Wii came, I did keep an eye on the gaming market, but I definitely wasn't interested in getting a new console.
The Wii was the first console in many years that created a small spark of desire inside of me to go back to playing games.
I think, as someone said, that Nintendo isn't competing with Sony and Microsoft these days, as much as they are competing with disinterest.
But... Am I a casual gamer? I suppose I am, now. But I used to be "hardcore". Nintendo managed to drag me back into gaming, at least partially. I think that might be part of their success -- winning over disinterested traditional gamers such as myself.
For all the bashing of "casual" games for the Wii, didn't any of you notice that, in, fact games of the past were usually quite simplistic? They may have been hard to play all the way through, but they certainly weren't the monsters of bloated cutscenes and story lines we have today.
Frankly, I'm getting sick of the whining about "casual games destroying the market". Accessible games means that people like me get to pick them up and play, and not have to invest many hours a day to do so. Ok, I admit I played through Super Mario Galaxy and managed to unlock Luigi. But it just doesn't feel like the "good old days".
Clever signature text goes here.
Take for example Blender3D, its a 3D modeling application, and those things have a complicate UI because they are complicated. The same goes for operating systems, defaults are great, a dumbed down intefrace is great, but it must not slow down the target audience (advanced users), because market share isn't the most important thing.
I only play fitness games that make me sweat: currently New U and My Fitness Coach. If designers came up with a game that could match those intense levels of exercise with a long, involved storyline I'd buy it. So far no-one has. Instead this market is full of simple, cheaply-made, narrative-free games. It's this misguided label of the casual gamer that's leading so many developers astray. I don't care about the time it takes to pick up a game. I just don't want to be sat on my bum for 5 hours at a time, getting fatter.
I'm not sure there's a gap. There are casual games (like Peggle) where you can sit down and have fun and then stop playing whenever, and hardcore games (like Red Orchestra or Counter-Strike) where you have to play for a long time to get anywhere, but then again there are games (like the GTA series or Team Fortress 2) which aren't exactly hardcore but still take more dedication than Peggle.
Correct, it's all about shooting and driving while banging a hooker and snorting blow while looking for your next contact.
Oh, and don't forget, running down pedestrians!
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
you can't just jump into it, there is a learning curve, its short but its brutal
You have to start with a tutorial like Blender Survival Guide by Ciccone Paolo
We've had a Wii for a year and a half now. It was my first console since the 8-bit NES, though I've been a on-again, off-again PC gamer for... well... ever. Anyway, my kids (K-8 range) are obviously more interested in Mario Kart and Animal Crossing than Call of Duty. While I think the Wii serves their demographic well (just threw up in my mouth a little writing that), it's not my preferred platform. I'm a racing sim fan, and of the dozens of racing games, there's only one serious title - F1 2009 (anything resembling mario kart, monster trucks, or drifting is not serious, and I'm not a bike fan). And Gran Turismo, the current leader of the pack, is obviously not available. But had I picked up a PS3, I'm sure my kids would've lost out just as much (and I'm certainly not going to buy both).
My point is that it would have been nice to cater to both me *and* my kids. But that doesn't fit with how these companies are doing business these days.
Jesus told him, "I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one can come to the Father except through me. - John 14:6 NLT
Good software design already takes the approach that a user interface should be accessible and functional to occasional users, but also have depth and features that more advanced users want. Why not apply this to games as well? You could have a suite of accessible "casual" games, possibly with optional expansion packs of various depths so you can graduate gamers...
I think the Wii will never appeal to the hardcore market, and the xbox 360 will rarely appeal to the casual market. my only question is this: why does their need to be a ladder to climb? why not stick to casual or move up to hardcore? it's the gamer's choice. and it's not like the hardcore games cost more. Let people play what they want.