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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.'"
... 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.
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.
About transitioning people from Monopoly to Settlers of Cataan to Dungeons and Dragons to tabletop gaming?
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
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".
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