Condiments said:
I think the ever-growing sentiment that "casuals are ruining the industry" needs to be addressed. I think this attitude has come more to the forefront due to massive success of the casual industry this generation, and the trends we've been seeing in our games. These include, lower difficulty, streamlined mechanics, less depth, low innovation, multiplayer prevalence and less genre diversity. Its natural to place the blame upon those "new" gamers considering many of these trends cater to their tastes. I, however, would like to point out that the same argument has used multiple times in the past, possibly even against you. It might give you some perspective that you were viewed equally as bad casual gamers today to older gamers, and I don't expect this line of reasoning to die out anytime soon.
However the fallacy of the argument doesn't rule out the fact that gaming truly IS changing. Its just that we can't make foolish assumptions and lay the current generation woes on "casual gamers". The truth I believe is much more complex. The trends I mentioned above might be a result of new gamers entering the fold with different expectations, but I think we're all to blame for the overall direction of the industry. The rapid march of technology, and our general expectation of what "production" values should be have played a large part of why games are what are they are these days.
I think simply put, the AAA industry can not support individual niches anymore. Its why we've seen a general "pooling" of genres(SHOOTERS AND RPG MECHANICS EVERYWHERE) and lower difficulty to appease the largest audience possible. Tailor your specific game to much, say like an epic turn based RPG or turn based strategy(like Temple of elemental evil or Xcom), and you're not going to garner the sales needed for success. Its why we see multiplayer being attached to what would normally be singleplayer games. Developers/publishers care about the perception of their product to the overall public(singleplayer/multiplayer alike), that they would include put together a haphazard multiplayer mode that doesn't even fit with the game. Why? Because they can't afford not to.
I think this is why I'm increasingly wary of this this next generation. I can't imagine the industry when production costs only will FURTHER increase from their current state, making it much harder to profit. This all ties to our expectation of production values should be. Its on us, bros, not them(the casuals). As long as we obsess over sheer graphic quality(no including art direction), genres like turn based strategy will be viewed as "non-contemporary" to developers(poor Xcom).
So what are your thoughts on this? What do you are the root causes for the "casualization" of the industry? Sorry for the long post. Kind of went on a ramble there.
The problem is the industry. I have no problem with capitalism, but I think it can go too far. The issue is that the industry is no longer content to make a decent profit, but wants to make the biggest possible profit off of everything it does.
Casual gamers are "the enemy" because with them outnumbering real gamers substantially any game aimed at them has the abillity to move more units. What's more casual gamers are far less demanding since they don't follow games or play them enough to be all that demanding in terms of quality. You poop out another shooter game using an existing toolset and some custom artwork, and it costs comparitively little to develop and there is a huge audience. Developing an epic turn based RPG involves a lot more work, includuing developing your own game engine, it also sells to less people, thus while it will make a a decent profit, it's not as profitable as puking out another shooter gamer.
On paper there is no reason why casuals, and gamers, need to be opposed to each other, there should be enough game production abillity for enough games to be produced accross the spectrum for everyone to be happy. In reality though the game industry of today has less people interested in making good/serious games, despite their PR, and more people interested in making as much money as possible, as quickly as possible. Thus everyone figures "well, we'll let someone else making the serious games" and goes running after the casual market... leaving increasingly few serious games for serious gamers on the market. What's more when you DO see a developer interested in taking the craft of game making seriously, they inevitably sell out, and then wind up being re-targeted at the casual audience. It's sort of like Bioware talking about "RPGs losing relevency" it's not that they are, or there isn't a demand, it's simply that they, and their new EA masters, know that there is more money in shooters, and creating a cinematic shooter is a cash pile. What Bioware would do on it's own is irrelevent when someone else assigns their priorities for them. After a while, any developer that has sold out generally stops caring as the cash rolls in.
Games have always been about making money, but today when it's moved beyond making a decent profit, to an attitude about monster profits and growth... yeah, I think that's a problem. I'm a big fan of capitalism, competition, owning your own property, and all of that stuff, but I think the big problem we have is a few greedy jerks inevitably ruining everything for everyone else. I loathe communism and socialism, and see Capitalism as the right track, but I do think the idea needs to be worked on to prevent this kind of thing from happening. I'm hardly a genius but something like a cap on how much money an individual or company can have/earn might work, rendering growth beyond a certain point irrelevet, and causing people to put more effort into their craft than simply profiteering at the expense of everyone and everything else given that after reaching a certain point it doesn't matter anymore. A lot could go wrong with that, and it's not an original idea, but the point is that really I think the gaming industry is a good example of the down side of an otherwise pefect system.
As far as the gaming industry being unable to make certain levels of games, that's a lollercaust, and I think it says a lot about the problem with casuals and those making up the gaming audience nowadays that people actually believe that. New technology wouldn't be an improvement if it wasn't viable to do what was done with previous technology.
The actual truth is simply that the human resources designing games have started to demand more and more money along with those monster profits, despite their pretensions otherwise. This means that hiring them to do similar amounts of work has become more difficult, since as the gaming industry brings in more money, the developers demand more pay from the publishers, causing a vicious cycle.
What's more publishers have no vested interest in producing long, high quality games. A game that can keep a player going for hundreds of hours of gameplay defeats the purpose of running a franchise where they want someone to buy a constant number of new games, if not from the same franchise, from similar ones. A game as big as the original "Deus Ex" would kind of cut into the sequel potential for "Deus Ex: Human Revolution" if people were really content with it for the long term, not to mention any similar types of games they want to release in the meantime while the sequel is coming out. Heck, if everyone is addictively playing the game you released a few months ago, then they might not buy the game (even of an unrelated type) your putting out right now.
I mean sure, we COULD see some serious changes if the industry decided to tighten it's belt, and content itself with lower profit margins (while still making profits of course). Understand this is a multi-billion dollar industry, guys like Bobby Kotick have private jets and get into sex scandals with their personal stewardesses (look it up). What's influacing your games is the money that allows him to do things like that, not any kind of actual design realities. It's just that the gaming industry now has this huge, casual market to exploit, pays off big bucks to th egaming media, and there really aren't that many serious gamers to call them on things, and when we do... who cares... there are tons of bleating casuals with their wallets out for the next CoD game, willing to whine about mistreatment (multi-player servers, etc...) but never do anything about it.
If the casuals/bros seem to be looked down on by a lot of elitist, serious gamers (like me I guess), understand that there are reasons for it, it's not just something that has occured "for the lulz". Actually with the numbers as they are, the serious gamers are usually putting their necks out because they are likely to get fanboy stomped at the very least.
You know, I wouldn't care if I saw more serious games, like real RPGs, but as it is, we're not because of the casual market and the way it's de-evolving the industry with it being presented as some kind of evolution... but when you hear Bioware trying to politely say it wants to move away from RPGs (as casual friendly as they were) that kind of illustrates the problem. The dislike between actual gamers and casuals is all caused by the business, and honestly I spend more of my time throwing bile at the game industry than the casual gamers themselves for a reason. I hope enough people will some day catch on, pressure the industry with their money to change things for the better, and then we can put all of this behind us. I lack the charisma to start a revolution, but I'll be able to say with a straight face "I was there, fighting for that, before it became cool and everyone jumped in". Who knows, maybe we'll see casuals and serious gamers directly united in camradarie, but that won't happen until the game industry is made to change.
