As someone whose Steam portfolio puts him squarely in the 1%, I would say that anyone with more than 10 Steam games has probably seen a Steam sale and made a brief cost/benefit analysis of what their cash would get them against the shallow samey repetition of a pay-to-play game. The only mobile game I have ever spent money on was Fallout Shelter, largely because anything Fallout-related has a nasty tendency to bypass the rational part of my brain in a way usually associated with Class A drugs.
Games are art, but not all art is equal, and not all art is enjoyed by the same audiences. Music is an art form, but I like some pieces of music and hate others. Paintings are art, but whilst Rothko leaves me cold, I like Chagall and Escher.
Moreover, consumers of the art get to choose our level of engagement: my girlfriend enjoys boardgames, Cards Against Humanity and plays the shit out of Candy Crush, but short of Civ 5 and Never Alone I have been largely unable to interest her in other videogames and she certainly doesn't self-identify as a gamer.
There is nothing wrong with having different tastes, and nothing wrong with someone who sells art trying to segment their market properly, but I am sick of people deciding that the arbitrary categories they create are profoundly unhelpful. I think the statement could have been worded substantially better: the "Core" are people who are already aware of the art and have at least a passing familiarity with it. When a new game is designed for the casual market, they are therefore not the core demographic. Mobile games target a market of "new" players, like my GF, who don't have experience with complex and demanding interfaces built over years of regular play with a range of games. They are designed to look nice, be simple to pick up and bring the player back for more at short intervals of regular play.
I don't think I necessarily departed too much from what Cook may have meant to say, but see how much less offensive that was? FFS, man, you are dealing with a notoriously sensitive demographic who just tore the arse out of an industry press who dissed them. Choose your words a little more carefully, could you?
For the record, I think the characterisation of people who own a lot of games as "novelty seekers" is both irrelevant and potentially inaccurate. As an Indie game maker, novelty is just about your best USP after nostalgia. Why would you discourage it?