Will Casual Games kill the Hardcore Market?

People on various websites and on message boards have been screaming all most since the Nintendo Wii came out about how it will be the end of gaming as we know it. They have also been worried about the industry as a whole moving toward only casual games and ignoring the smaller hardcore market.

What is hardcore? What is casual? What is everyone talking about?
Easy... Some comparisons have been made like,
"There are no hardcore readers or movie goers? How can there be for gaming?" Well this isn't true. "Hardcore readers," are people who like classics rather than those who read Danielle Steel novels. "Hardcore moviegoers," are people who only go to foreign films and prefer four star flicks rather than Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure.
Does the Hardcore movie market or literature markets hurt the causal ones? They don't even make a dent. The casual markets rule; they make all the money and they drive all the sales. The industry revolves around them.

In gaming, hardcore gaming is basically people who love to play games that are complex and require a certain degree of dedication. This would be something like Final Fantasy XII or perhaps Team Fortress 2. But it could also extend to games like World of Warcraft or Halo. Casual games are basically pick up and play. They don't need instructions and tend to be based on simple principals. Casual games are usually seen as games like Tetris, Pac-Man, Zuma, Wii Sports, Rayman Raving Rabids, or even Pokemon.

There are certainly games like Guitar Hero that span both areas/ Bit this is really a case of involvement in a hardcore game rather than making a hardcore game appear casual. I mean a lot of people have played 3 or 4 hours of Halo or Guitar Hero in a month. But if that same 3 or 4 hours were in a day rather than a month then that would qualify more on the hardcore scale. But this really only involves games that allow the player to play in smaller pieces rather than requiring them to play for longer stretches to get proficient at some part of the game to progress.


So there you go... No need to have a debate over that little matter. If your unsure of the veracity of my claims take a look at the majority of the Nintendo catalog and the majority of the XBOX 360 and compare. You'll see the differences pretty readily.

Now, to the point. Will casual gaming hurt the hardcore gaming market? Only if developers and publishers allow it to. If developers and publishers feel it is necessary to simplify their games to match some mythical casual average. Everyone above and below that average will suffer.

As things stand now, the hardcore market is actually driving the video game market; helped by the casual market. This includes things like the Nintendo Wii and Nintendo DS sales. Also, games like Guitar Hero 3 and Rock Band contribute to the huge return on video game sales. In October, video game sales rocked a 1.1 Billion dollar total and this is an astonishing number. Certainly nothing bad can come from numbers like this.

Possibly in the short run things will remain just about the same and even Nintendo admits that the Wii is far from future proof. In a year or two there will probably be a new version of the Wii that is more powerful and more compatible with what developers and publishers are looking for in hardcore gaming.

Doing this will ultimately make the Nintendo Wii and possibly the DS perfect gaming systems. However, there are some questions as to whether Nintendo itself understands what hardcore means. But we will leave that for the future to decide. In short, it will not be Nintendo who brings down hardcore gaming. Rather it was the flag bearer for trying to make causal gaming more interesting to the average person. In the long run, it will be the gamers who decide what is and what is not acceptable.

Video games are one of the most volatile markets out there. There are SO MANY factors that dictate what makes money and what doesn't. Gamers old or young are a fickle bunch. This year has been a historic year for excellent video games and so far an excellent year for video game sales. What happens next year may be very different. But that, will be decided in time.