Strazdas said:
13. Casual gamers have ruined gaming.
ill comment anyway. casual gamers havent ruined gaming. game companies pandering out for casual gamers and going from their niche market full of fans to casual market just because "its on the rise" has ruined gaming companies. not all companies went there, and i respect them to sticking to their fans. and i realize the need for new IP experiments, but that does not mean going from harcore RTS to farmville like in a day.
Well the issue as I see it is greed, pure and simple. Companies are not content to make a fair profit for a good product, they want the most monsterous profits possible for the least amount of effort. Some will argue that business has always been this way, but truthfully I don't think it has been as bad, within so many differant industries. When it comes to gaming I think a lot of people can actually see the change in attitude, espcially if they have been following gaming and the companies/creators for a couple of decades.
A recent example I think would be Funcom. "The Secret World" launched earlier this year, and was heavily promoted as a niche game, aimed at a crowd of fairly hardcore, mature gamers. It was going to include some adult elements, and a pretty hard core difficulty curve. A lot of people were drawn to this game because it wasn't a game that was making pretensions of being a WoW-killer or trying to cater to a mainstream audience. I supported it early on with a lifetime membership because I liked their attitude.
When "The Secret World" launched the massive QQing was immediate. It turns out they were lying and all of their hype about a niche game and all of that was just marketing, they were expecting this blockbuster success. Much like they expected Age Of Conan to be when it launched. Needless to say their quirky, mature, modern fantasy/horror game didn't suck in the masses so it was a failure. Layoffs hit, the game went free to play, and while it's been slowly expanding, the future of the game is in doubt. Apparently Funcom wants to move from MMOs to more casual products, I think I read something (maybe on The Escapist) about them picking up a Lego liscence for quick cash.
It basically goes to show that nobody is willing to accept what is simply a decent success, and make their profits slowly. Claiming that is simply another marketing tool nowadays. You either play big, or you don't play at all. The money isn't rolling in like planned, quick make your MMO a FTP cash vampire, a couple of titles don't break sales expectations, terminate the company and layoff the staff.
I think it's the casuals that brought in these expectations, due to things like Farmville, and franchises like "Call OF Duty" (which is a casual game, despite pretensions of it being hardcore, it just caters to a differant style of casuals than Farmville). No niche game is ever going to perform as well as one you can get just about anyone playing with minimal effort, all those rude kids in CoD are paying customers, as are a lot of those "cow clickers" when they grow impatient.
This is how I see things at any rate. The casuals aren't a blight just because they want simpler games and things that are approchable. They are a blight because that's all anyone wants to make because of the potential profit. Arguements about how "why hate the casuals, if there are games made for everyone" when really, that's increasingly not the case since nobody is content with a niche game, for a niche audience, and simply making a decent profit. That might be how business has always been as some will say, but if that's true it still brings it right back down onto the casuals for creating the problem that is moving business on to cater to them esclusively. For the moment Funcom, a fairly serious MMO developer, has gone casual simply because there isn't enough money in developing serious MMOs. They aren't likely to have another epic MMO ready in a few years from the sound of things, and this general trend exists for a lot fo companies, the developers aiming at serious gamers are disappearing, and those who were concerned called this trend a long time away, it just didn't seem to be as big a deal until it started to get closer.
I also don't think "Indie" games are the answer, to be blunt there is only so much that can be done with an indie budget and skill level. Your serious gamer wants his AAA technology, bells, and whistles combined with his demands for deep, smart, gameplay that is likely to make a casual go into brain aneurisms. Some indie developer coughing out a solid little RPG with his modest abillities does not equal say "Dragon Age: Origins", "Skyrim", or what games like "Wizardry" and "Ultima" were to their platforms when they were new (OMG, I'll need a 386 to play Ultima 7!). Likewise on an MMO scale unreasonable expectations for fast returns means that rapidly we're going to see nothing but Pay 2 Win cash vampires that are far more modest than "The Secret World" in their basic content, never mind approaching what we saw attempted wiht "ToR" or what WoW turned into, all because nobody is willing to accept anything but mountains of cash at their feet, right then and there, which catering to casuals can get them.
