Hardcore to Be Pushed Aside This Console Generation? 142
Gamasutra asks questions directly of analysts on a semi-regular basis, in a feature they call 'Analyze This'. This week they quiz analysts about the rising influence of casual players, and what this means for the dedicated hardcore gamer. The ubiquitous Michael Pachter: "I think some portion of family growth will come from aging of original Xbox owners, who will have families of their own and will likely play games with their children. I also think that newer features on the Elite, like the 80GB hard drive, will encourage more family activities, like downloading TV shows and movies. In essence, I don't see [Microsoft] trying to cannibalize the Wii audience, so much as to trying to offer an alternative with the Xbox 360 as the home media center. I don't think that there is any real threat to the long-term survival of the Xbox 360."
What?! (Score:4, Insightful)
Downloading TV shows and movies are family activities? That doesn't sound like a very rich family life to me. Family activities are things like sailing trips, playing scrabble, and laughing at Dad's grilling abilities. Or even waving wands around in front of a TV in a game of Wii boxing...
You'll be less special, that's all (Score:5, Insightful)
Other than that, things won't change, except you'll have more choices. While the casual gamer market is growing and has the potential to be very large, the hardcore gamer market still has plenty of money to spend, the game industry knows that, and they're already set up for and experienced with serving that market. They're not going to completely abandon it to make minigames, the industry is just going to grow to cover the new types of games.
The only thing that will really change for hardcore gamers is that they'll increase the amount of bitching they do about all those ordinary people trying to pretend that they're real gamers. "They don't know what it's like, they've never played for 14 hours straight, they don't have eight obsolete consoles stacked in their basement, why don't you go play on your cellphone"
The market isn't shifting to casual games, it's growing to include them. Things might look a little strange right now because publishers are testing the waters a bit, but it'll balance out soon enough. Valve isn't going to abandon Half-life to make bejeweled clones, there will be plenty of MMO's and RPG's in the future. There's not much to worry about.
Atari say's please use caution... (Score:5, Insightful)
A few thoughts (Score:5, Insightful)
I agree that Sony will win the HD format war, but I don't believe that it will convey any real advantage to Sony. The uptake on HD formats has been incredibly slow. Even if Sony were to wipe out HD-DVD tomorrow, they would only inherit a very small piece of market share.
I have to disagree. If the PS2 proved anything, it's that very few gamers will support more than one console in their home. The hardcore types had a Gamecube (only $99!) as well, but that didn't stop the GCN from being the worst performing console that Nintendo ever released. (~22 million units worldwide) Microsoft didn't fare much better, just barely edging out the Wii's sales. (~24 million units worldwide)
All this adds up to a single, inescapable conclusion: The casual market is a zero sum game. There can only be one winner who takes the lion's share of the market pie.
This is what a lot of people keep missing. The PS2 continues to go strong because it appeals to the casual gaming crowd. It may have initially sold well because it was a cheap DVD player, but that offered the market a way to reach the casual gamer. (Whether it was understood at the time or not.) Those customers are extremely happy with their $120 DVD/Tetris/Guitar Hero machines, so why should they spend $600 for a PS3? The answer, of course, is that they're not going to. They may purchase a Wii, but it's only because it provides gaming possibilities that their existing machine doesn't. And they don't need to break the bank to get one.
Re:A few thoughts (Score:3, Insightful)
If anything, the Wii has an opportunity here to be a gateway console into more serious gaming. I expect that the retirement homes now stocking Wii's will have some patrons who later buy Xbox360's or PS3's.
The world changes. It's fun that way.
Re:You'll be less special, that's all (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't know if it is something to worry about, but perhaps Valve would see it logical, business-wise, to abandon Half-life to make bejeweled clones, along with a lot of 'hardcore gamer' shops.
Why wouldn't they? Current 'hardcore games' seems a risky proposition - high investment (time + money), extremely competitive, short lifespan on the market per release...
If casual games promises a much bigger market, where you can sell cheaper (to make) games at a lower risk, with higher profit margins... it would make perfect business sense to focus on making those games.
Just like right now it makes a lot of sense to focus on making MMOs than on making the next Doom.
Some snippets from TFA (Score:5, Insightful)
What Pachter is forgetting is that the casual market very rarely buys more than one console, which completely screws up the whole "hardcore first, casual second" strategy he's suggesting for the 360 and PS3. That simply won't "work" in the way he thinks it will, because by the time the 360 and PS3 are ready for casuals the vast majority of them will already be playing the Wii. That the Wii has also attracted some number of hardcore players is the icing on the cake.
It will "work" in the sense that Sony and Microsoft might turn a profit, but not in any sense they'd like. It's a strategic failure to let a competitor horn in on your turf while simultaneously leaving them to frollic freely on theirs. The "tried and true" strategy worked previous because everyone was doing it. You don't have to delve far into history to see how often the "tried and true" got usurped as humanity moved forward.
By the time the 360 and PS3 hit the "magic number", it will already be too late. Assuming the PS3 drops at the current rate, that's a $100 drop every 8-9 months, putting the now $499 PS3 at $199 in August 2009. That's 2 full freaking years of letting Nintendo run amok with the casuals. Sony is going to need exclusive rights to Spore in order to rip casuals off of the Wii by then. Nothing short of that kind of casual star power is going to cut it.
Barton:
An 8 to 10 year lifetime might work, if the PS3 attracted the casual crowd. The casual crowd isn't quite as obsessed with aging graphics as the hardcore, and so will keep an older system long after hardcore players have shelved or sold it. The inherent problem here is that the Wii and DS are picking up all the casual players. Unless Sony can find a way to break them away from Nintendo's offerings, the 10 year lifetime won't happen. 4 years from now the hardcore will move onto the next big thing. The Cell is a neat processor, but it is not enough to keep up with the advances that will be made as time passes.
Re:Atari say's please use caution... (Score:1, Insightful)
I've noticed that this is a very common problem amongst American posters. Aren't they teaching appropriate apostrophe usage in schools?
Re:Atari say's please use caution... (Score:2, Insightful)
If you look at gaming, as a media, what you see is what basically amounts to what would happen if you took a summer action blockbuster schedule(quite popular with the 16-25 demo!) and rehashed it, year, after year, after year, only improving the CGI, and maybe the fight scenes. Anything fresh, withers and dies on the vine on the "hardcore" systems. Clover closed. Psychonauts was a commerical failure. Ico sold something like 10,000 copies. The success of anything remotely fresh is(perhaps was is better here?) a rarity, and quality has little impact on that. When something fresh IS successful, it quickly joins the rehash bandwagon. It's like 20 years of Naruto and knockoffs, 15 years of Terminator and Independence day sequels and knockoffs, with the past 5 years adding Pulp Fiction sequels and knockoffs.
The casual market, which is really better termed the mainstream market, which the Wii is reaching, has no expectations. Everything is novel to them, and judged with a completely fresh perspective. This is also why Halo is so popular incidentally, and older FPS gamers cringe at people calling it revolutionary. So yes, for a while, people will be willing to accept shovelware. This is partly(the rest being the novelty) because well, gaming media, and gaming criticism is an utterly pathetic puerile field. You don't see Roger Ebert knocking 2 stars off a film because it was made in Super 8 on a shoestring budget, because that's not the point to film, and you know what you're getting when you hear it was filmed in Super 8 on a shoestring budget. You see game critics do this all the time, and the bulk of their reviews are for an enthuisiast audience, which is an additional problem. When you give the games casual gamers like poor scores because of things they don't care about, you lose all of your credibility. Mainstream publications LOVE Wii sports, and the system has hit almost 10 million sold on the strength of largely that alone, it's doing blockbuster sales in Japan. Gaming publications scored it poorly(77%, resistence, which has had next to no market impact got an 87%). So you'll see in the growth of the industry into a casual market the emergence of a real, mainstream gaming media and review arm to cater to the mainstream. This, and time, will kill the shovelware, generate a real critical environment.
The other thing about casual and new gamers. They're more willing to experiment, because they have no biases. The hardcore audience has proven themselves adverse to this. Even a change in art direction can bring calls of derision(see "Cellda!"). This is good for the long term health of the industry, because believe me, most people will eventually grow out of(kids, additional responsibilities, whatever) or get sick of the blockbuster model. It happened to me, and there are countless other ex-hardcore gamers on this very forum in the same boat. If they buy 5 games a year, it's more likely that those will be in 5 different genres than all in the same genre, until they transition into a genre enthuisiast, at which point, they're "hardcore" anyway. If you have one FPS to play through, you don't need 4 more. You're already seeing this with the Wii release schedule this year. The genre coverage is missing VERY few things, the 360 and PS3 are chock full of hol
Heh (Score:5, Insightful)
You mean like The Sims outsold any FPS ever, even without counting the expansion packs? Don't mistake your own preferences for the One True Blockbuster. There were a _lot_ of games that sold very well in spite (or maybe because) of having little or no violence.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not against violence as such. But if you're going to make claims about what sells, it would be, you know, nice, to actually look at some sales numbers and not just extrapolate based on what _you_ have bought. Not everyone is a clone of yourself.
A mistake many people make is assuming, basically, "there are so many violent FPSs, because everyone wants to play a violent FPS." Actually, wrong. The rise of the FPS was based on the fact that what counts isn't the raw sales, but sales minus expenses, a.k.a. profit. At the time when FPS was rising and, say, Adventure games skirted with extinction, actually adventures were a growing market and routinely outsold FPS. But the costs of making a modern adventure were rising faster, whereas an FPS was damn cheap to make. A FPS could make a bigger profit even if it sold half the number of copies. _That's_ why everyone rushed to make an FPS.
Violent games as a more global category, are a vaguely similar case.
Coming up with an idea like Sim City or The Sims or Civilization or Tetris, is something that requires someone to come up with a brand new idea. And it turns out that there's a severe shortage of people with ideas that are (A) genuinely new, and (B) not crap. And there's a lot of risk involved, since basically you're not sure of point B until you actually launch the game. You're betting a huge bunch of money on something that you don't know how many people will like. Being a new idea, the marketting department can at best take a guess.
By comparison, it's a no-brainer to make a violent game. Wop-de-freakin'-do, so this time it's with more damage textures and more death animations. That's sooo creative. Not. And you already have a good idea of the market too. You just need to look at how many people bought last year's game, and you can have a pretty informed guess as to how many will buy the remake in higher (and gorrier) res.
So the fact that everyone and their grandma does a violent game, isn't because it's the only thing that sells. Quite on the contrary, the other category outsells it quite often. They do violent games, because it's the simple, cheap, no-risks way out.
WTF? (Score:4, Insightful)
Is this bad? (Score:3, Insightful)