299: Casual Gamers Are Better Than You

Zay-el

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benvorbeck said:
I really enjoyed reading this article and the comments and evrything in it is true but for good reason. I am a hardcore gamer myself and yes it true that we complain and ***** about casual gamers.
I think the fear we(hardcore gamers) hav is that most developers main ineterest is just making money and that they lack in passion and skill to make deeper and better games.
We think if we dont complain about casuals and making a point about it, developers will just do what they want and produce less good games.

So i say : lets fight for the art of gaming and look down upon casual gamers !!!
Casual gaming seems to be the ultimate evil for so many. You know what, I agree. Let's NOT make people enjoy games, that's such an oldschool and stupid concept, we should really just have them grind endlessly. Let them know they must do chores for EVERYTHING and even the momentary enjoyment they have, should be crushed.

I say, let's not even stop there! Let's take it a step forward and abolish amateur sports as well. Damn casuals ruining the enjoyment of professional sports, HOW DARE THEY?!
 

thetragicclown

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Amen, Jim. Amen.

Rather than squealing and whining about the influx of Casual gamers "killing off the industry", self-professed Hardcore Gamers should welcome the new blood with open arms. Diversity is a good thing for the industry and for the medium as a whole, and the broad tastes of Casual gamers give developers an opportunity to develop new and original titles. I'd rather see a new quirky little puzzle game than another tired rehash of Generic Space Marine Shooter #431

Alas, the Hardcore crowd would rather sit in the corner sulking about not being the only ones in their special little clubhouse anymore. I may not personally be interested in Dance Central or Farmville myself, but I welcome their addition to the greater fabric of gaming because it should be something everyone can enjoy. Whether a game is ultimately fun or not is what should matter, not arbitrary classifications made up by bitter nerds with an entire fish and chip shop on their shoulder. To quote Omar from The Wire, "it's all in the game bro."

Then again I started playing games at a time when they weren't so rigidly defined as they are now, came on cassette tapes sold at pharmacies and took ten minutes to load, so my perspective is somewhat different from your typical screaming adolescent Halo fanboy.
 

Continuity

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Jim Sterling said:
Casual Gamers Are Better Than You

As much as hardcore gamers may sneer at casual players, one has to remember a rather stark and unpleasant fact - in more than one way, they're better than you.


Read Full Article
Troll much?

Seriously the only thing that casual gamers have over core gamers is that they are willing to throw cash at developers for crap content. I'm not sure thats better... unless you're a developer.
 

Darkauthor81

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teknoarcanist said:
Twenty years from now, we're going to look back at this as the period when gaming took off as a socially acceptable recreational activity, to the extent that your grandma was playing games -- and wonder why in the hell we ever saw this as a bad thing.

In the short term, sure, it makes publishers put down that interesting new IP and run screaming for the shovelware money pile.

But in the long term? More of society playing games? More money going into games? Games like Wii Fit 'gameifying' workout routines and Chore Wars gameifying household responsibilities -- how can any hardcore gamer be so against this rapid expansion of the medium into all the corners of the modern experience?
It's equal parts people don't like change and too many hard core gamers are hipster douche bags who resist the idea that their niche market is becoming mainstream. This resistance has happened to every entertainment medium that has ever become popularized and wide spread. From heavy metal and rap to comic book super heroes.

As long as only a few people know about or are into it then the hipster feels superior for knowing about it and embracing it. He loses that feeling of superiority when lots of people embrace it and reacts with anger before moving onto something else niche to invest his ego into for knowing about.

It's an endless cycle of pretentiousness.
 

Darkauthor81

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Continuity said:
Jim Sterling said:
Casual Gamers Are Better Than You

As much as hardcore gamers may sneer at casual players, one has to remember a rather stark and unpleasant fact - in more than one way, they're better than you.


Read Full Article
Troll much?

Seriously the only thing that casual gamers have over core gamers is that they are willing to throw cash at developers for crap content. I'm not sure thats better... unless you're a developer.
Hey have you ever played an NES game? 90% of them were crap that we as children begged our parents for with tears and tantrums. The causal game glut is just in that preliminary phase. In ten years all those casual gamers of today will be just as jaded and angry as we are.
 

teknoarcanist

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Darkauthor81 said:
teknoarcanist said:
Twenty years from now, we're going to look back at this as the period when gaming took off as a socially acceptable recreational activity, to the extent that your grandma was playing games -- and wonder why in the hell we ever saw this as a bad thing.

In the short term, sure, it makes publishers put down that interesting new IP and run screaming for the shovelware money pile.

But in the long term? More of society playing games? More money going into games? Games like Wii Fit 'gameifying' workout routines and Chore Wars gameifying household responsibilities -- how can any hardcore gamer be so against this rapid expansion of the medium into all the corners of the modern experience?
It's equal parts people don't like change and too many hard core gamers are hipster douche bags who resist the idea that their niche market is becoming mainstream. This resistance has happened to every entertainment medium that has ever become popularized and wide spread. From heavy metal and rap to comic book super heroes.

As long as only a few people know about or are into it then the hipster feels superior for knowing about it and embracing it. He loses that feeling of superiority when lots of people embrace it and reacts with anger before moving onto something else niche to invest his ego into for knowing about.

It's an endless cycle of pretentiousness.
Hardcore gamers, shamed into exile, now form a closely-knit community around the cultivation of homemade yogurts.
 

aldowyn

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No offense, but... I don't agree. In some parts you are indisputably right, but in some cases, not so much. It is the middle-of-the-road people who buy the games like Kane & Lynch 2, not the real core gamers. My definition of "core gamer" may be more narrow than yours, but I believe that the core gamer is careful enough to at least try and figure out how good a game is before they play it, and is intelligent enough to know that Okami or Psychonauts is better than that sequel to that one drab shooter.
 

Callate

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In some ways, I think the author is playing devil's advocate. However, this

Bear in mind, of course, that the Farmville player is having just as much fun as you are, regardless of the experience's respective depths.
is hogwash.

Oh, there may be fun to be had in Farmville in the beginning. But what I see over and over again in Farmville and most other Facebook games of its ilk is that it ceases to be "fun" long before the player stops playing. A sense of your community of players "needing" you, a fear of the possibility of "losing" virtual goods if one doesn't log in frequently, a sense of losing things one has spent hours of one's life on that leads to throwing good time after bad... In the long run, these games aren't even designed to be "fun". They're designed to be just flashy and/or entertaining enough to draw a player in, to string out a bare minimum of content (designer output, thus stuff that actually costs the dev time and money to design) while seeding the mechanics that fill the player with senses of pseudoresponsibility and dread and keep them playing even if the process of doing so is making the player miserable!

Say what you will about the big franchises, the players put as much time into them as they choose, and at a certain point, they're done with them and moving on to the next thing having refined their tastes. And probably actually enjoyed themselves. The equation that says a $60 game with ten to twenty hours of genuinely enjoyable play is a worse deal than a game that's "free" but gives five hours of enjoyable play, five hours of amusing play, and then another ninety or more hours of "Oh sweet mother of pearl, what time is it, I've got to water my crops!" is a false equation.
 

Flamebait

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Article Name: Casual Gamers Are Better Than You

Let's just look at that article name. Clearly intended to flame. That's it. I can think of one place where that kind of flaming is allowed to fly: /b.

Good job, Mr. Sterling. You are a troll from 4chan. And congrats, you got lots of readers to bite on your trolling. Myself included. You win, I guess.

Here, I'll spend 2 sentences pretending that you deserve serious argument:

The idea that someone mindlessly playing Farmville is having just as much fun as a hardcore gamer going back to Halflife 2 would have is ridiculous.

A more accurate statement: 5 million casual gamers have more money than 100,000 hardcore gamers.

Okay, I'm done. Couldn't keep biting.

You abused shock value to get this error-riddled article published. Only garbage journalism would replace quality writing with shock value. Shame on you.

Hey, escapist magazine - First the "pc gaming is dead" article, now This excrement - how about you start requiring these terrible journalists to actually back up their bold statements before publishing their articles?

Here's a rubric for you:

1. Does the article's content back up the initial statements? Y/N

There you go. If the answer to that is no, send it back. This should never have been published.
 

ultrachicken

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What do you mean, "hardcore gamers distrust innovation?" "Hardcores" are always bitching and moaning about the fact that call of duty is getting its 7th sequel, or how many clones of specific games there are. Look at portal, look at minecraft.
 

Eldarion

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You've VASTLY overgeneralized a lot of people to support your argument. A lot. As in, I have never seen this much in one article.
 

bushwhacker2k

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So... pretty much casual gamers are better because they aren't elitist snobs?... Why is this 4 pages long again?

Also, title is so obviously to bait people xD

---

I don't really see casual games as advancing games as a whole, it seems more like it's stunting the growth of games... well, god, I could say this about a lot of things...

Anyways my point is, besides the fat wads of cash Zynga and whoever else seems to be making I don't see it really improving games by making them more accessible, I still can't see someone who only plays Farmville giving more in depth games a try...

My belief is that so many people are becoming gamers and being raised gamers these days that eventually people who don't play games will be the minority.

I don't hate casual games, I just don't think they're that interesting.
 

tiger_cub684

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At the end of the day, video games are a product. You cannot produce a product without some investment, and the aim of the product is to make money. If a significant percent of your consumers are not paying money for this product, your profit margins will suffer. And what are profit margins used for? Creating more product.

So basically, i agree with the premise that Casual gamers are better than pirating hardcore gamers. These fans are hurting their own industry by stealing the product from hard working developers and not allowing them the funds to create more. I really don't see how there can be a justification for piracy, except maybe the "i bought it once, it stopped working, so i pirated a working version", because in that instance, at least some money was exchanged.
Another acceptable justification may be for people outside America, where the price of imported video games is inflated ridiculously (an average new Xbox 360 title sells for about $100 here in Australia. AND our dollar is stronger than the american one atm). And i'll admit that's just bullshit. It would be cheaper to buy overseas and pay for shipping, if only games weren't region coded.

But, in summary, the instance of pirating casual games is much lower (although I know for fact it's possible to pirate games such as Virtual Villigers and Diner Dash) which means, in the instances where the games as for money, they're paying for it. Which then supports the further development of more casual games.

This is ignoring of course the value of indepth story and complex characters vs bright colours and cartoony animation.

Also, we could probably argue casual gamers generally have more going on in their lives, since they don't spend hours upon hours each day glued to a PC or console...but that could be debatable.

As more of a hybrid gamer, I'm not really biased ether way. I play hardcore AND casual games and don't really see the big deal in segmenting the gaming community over it. But that's just my 2 cents.
And now I leave you with a question; what is Pokemon? Harcore or casual? It's got all the collecting and grinding elements of an RPG with a basic story line, yet it's accessable enough that 5 yr olds are playing it, and you can put it down for months at a time and pick it up without missing a thing.
 

gring

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If by core gamers you mean fanboy's of a specific genre (cough FPS's cough), then yes. But really, most gamers, "core" or "casual" usually have specific tastes and they stay within those tastes. casuals just like pretty lights and easy controls, "core" like to shoot things, sometimes in different ways, or they like heavy games of strategy or RPG's or whatever because that's what they enjoy. maybe their time is limited anyways, and wouldn't play anything else because of it.

You have to be careful with your wording though because the REAL "core" gamers ARE the ones who actually try new things and WANT new experiences, but usually in a HARD (or at least interactive) environment, but can't play games that are just too simplistic and mindless or just straight up designed to pray off peoples weaknesses (farmville). Thats ACTUALLY hardcore, to learn entirely difficult new game styles so often and so many times over is actually HARD for a lot of people.

Like, I play just about every genre of game, turn-based or real-time, strategy, FPS, action, button-masher, RPG, puzzle, "artsy indie games", adventure games, card games, casual games, MINECRAFT, etc (if i missed anything and you can name it i've PROBABLY tried it). But the thing is, is that while im able to try new games, I'm not as easily impressed as most people with a lot of them, and in the end, there has to be enough REASON to play for me, because my time is more valuable then just being addicted to bejeweled/farmville for weeks at a time, which in reality is the situation with a lot of these "casuals", and definitely even with the "cores".

But are any of these casuals going to pick up any of the games I usually play? NOPE. Therefore, in a lot of ways, the cores and casuals are actually the exact same. "cores" play core games, "casuals" play casual games.

So, really, this argument is flawed in a lot of ways, and was created for shock value to lure in hits, which it worked for me, but still felt like I should comment. These generalized and super opinionated views don't really help anyone though.
 

poleboy

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I think it's sad that in order to defend the casual gamer, Sterling resorts to first building a giant wall between the supposed casual gamer and the supposed hardcore gamer, and then telling his readers that they belong on the wrong side (hardcore).

Not only is he making the obvious mistake of assuming that there are only casual and hardcore gamers and that you stay in one group for life, he also somehow manages to play up the hate between the groups on the pretext of defending one.

If I didn't know better, I'd almost think the Escapist was trolling us. The article has no meaningful conclusion and serves better as flamebait than a defense for anything. I don't think of myself as a hardcore gamer, but as someone with 20+ years of gaming experience, I get the feeling that I'm being targeted, for reasons I don't really understand.
 

Aurora Firestorm

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May 1, 2008
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Sterling, your Farmville argument is horribly flawed. Do you know how much it costs Square-Enix to make a Final Fantasy game, or for Kojima to make another MGS game? The graphics alone are bloody expensive, and Farmville is a cheap Flash-y game. You just can't even put these on the same playing field if you're talking about costs.

We pay $60 because we're playing movie-quality graphics on a beast of a machine designed to run them. Farmville, on the other hand, requires any old puttery computer to run. Also, we're paying for high levels of plot, complex and enthralling gameplay, and 40+ hours of constant new experiences. Farmville is a grind, has no plot, very simplistic gameplay, and people pay *extra* to enhance a game that isn't giving you anything past a basic "operant conditioning" experience. (Watch Extra Credits.)

Also, let's look at the Wii. It's heralded as a casual gaming boom -- or, to core gamers, a total failure. The problem isn't really that Mom and Dad got into the console and decided they wanted games, too -- the problem is that Nintendo completely shut down its core games for this demographic. They played it as a zero-sum game -- if casual gamers got what they wanted, we couldn't get what we wanted. This basically pits one group against another, fighting for companies' attention, and of course we can't stand casual gaming if this is the case. They're taking all our space and our resources.

Casual gamers are actually *less* open than core gamers, mostly because they refuse to touch anything that requires you to press multiple buttons at the same time. Mom doesn't want to learn how to use a controller. Junior can bang out combos in Soul Calibur like he was born for it. The number of games requiring complex controller shenanigans -- and I don't even mean fighting game type shenanigans, just your normal level of "hold this button, now run, now press a couple more -- are pretty much *every game in existence* for the core demographic. Casual gamers don't want to learn to play our way; they don't want any of our gameplay. They just want to twiddle their avatars. They're the reason that Spore got destroyed, turned from a Supergame into "let's give the n00bs an introduction to several genres of game." They don't want to be skilled, and they don't want to keep track of buttons. Basically, they want a dumbed-down version of core gameplay, and this isn't okay for us.

This would all be okay, if companies could decide to go with *both* demographics, but after the fiasco that was the Wii (and I still haven't forgiven them for Spore), I'm not sure we can play nice with the other kids.
 
Jan 22, 2011
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So just accept the latest/greatest game, don't question it and just play it for fun.. Yeah I miss those days but I am no longer twelve years old anymore. Yes having some causal gamers is essential in the market like movie or TV show fans. You need these fans for a main product to sell, hell I know people that only buy a xbox or wii just for the use of netflix and older games.

However if you cater to much on either end then it becomes a huge problem like with the Wii or Psp. I love both of those systems equally but marketing isn't strong point for neither one of these systems and holding out on decent games due to lame excuses is only going to add fuel the fire for legit reasons to pirate.