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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.'"
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
I absolutely disagree with you.
As someone who used to be hardcore into ID Software FPS titles, now that I am an adult with more responsibilities, it is harder to dedicate that much time towards finding a another freaking Intel Item, hidden obscurely in some level somewhere.
If I cannot play for 15-20 minutes and abort where I am at, without suffering huge penalties, I am not going to ever finish that game.
I am much more interested in quick games on my iPad, but wouldn't mind if they had a little more depth. Save the super hardcore games for the high school kids, but give us more than Poppit.