Casual gaming isn't bad for games right?!?

Games
41

I think casinos provide a good analogy to the video games market. In this picture, slot machines are casual games and table games (Craps, Blackjack, Poker, etc.) are hardcore games.

Back in the day slots were a novelty and casinos were built on table games. Folks looking for a low-skill game pretty much took up Roulette. However, as time has passed and technology has improved, slots have taken over casinos. Ask slot players why they don’t play table games and the response is almost always related to not wanting to play with others, not understanding the game, or not wanting to play something challenging (sound familiar?).

For table game players, this was fine - slots were loud and obnoxious, but the slots and tables were kept in separate areas on the casino floor so the players didn’t have to mix much. However, casinos realized that the profits from slots were insane compared to their table games and kept reducing the table game space to expand the slots space - even putting slots BETWEEN table game areas. For table game players who don’t want to play slots, this was annoying but still fine - at least the table games were still around, even if there weren’t as many.

Well, let’s look at the modern casino. Rewards and comps? Most programs are heavily geared to reward slots players and do jack for table players. Floor space is at a premium, and table gaming areas now are judged based on hourly return with slots providing the baseline for successful use of resources. Table games also require more skilled personnel to maintain - pit bosses and dealers - while slots just need to be plugged in. Newly created table games are dumbed down affairs - many are no more complicated or require any more skill than a slot machine - Let It Ride is the perfect example of a slot machine played with dealt cards. Slot-style side bets now appear on just about every table game - if you’re playing a game where you get dealt 3 cards, you now can side bet on if your random cards match up, just like slot reels!

So just don’t play those bets - ignore the slots. Live and let live. Too bad - casinos now are CHANGING the rules and payouts of classic table games like Blackjack and Craps to make them more profitable. Have you seen the new 6-to-5 Blackjack instead of the classic 3-to-2? Seems small, but this wrecks the normally low house advantage of what used to be the best game in the casino. The rake on poker has gone through the roof.

Is there anything anyone can really do about it? Probably not. Step into any casino and look at the hordes and hordes of slot players with their little buckets, playing their micro-transaction games, pressing the buttons, and watching lights flash and chimes rings. Is this not the future? Is this not the promised land?

42

I don’t know if I wholly agree with it Reldan, but that may be the finest analogy I’ve seen for the scenario that casual game opponents fear is coming true.

43

Yes very nice job Reldan!
Saved the analogy for future reference.

I’m happy that I’m not the only one of this (unpopular) opinion since a few people spoke out in this thread.

I also agree that “casual game” doesn’t really cut it since there are exceptions in the ones labeled like that but I’m unable to come up with a good term for games that have a good amount of challenge removed and mainly cater to people that are happy with that (dumbed down etc. is offensive).

44

It was inevitable: the red ring of death always reminded him of the fate of requited love.

45

very well thought out Reldan. seems pretty accurate as well.

46

So what’s the problem here? The Casinos realized the majority of customers wanted something they weren’t providing, so they shifted to providing a lot more of that. They are catering to what the market wants. This sounds like progress to me, but you have framed it negatively.

47

Sounds like many casinos are turning into something akin to Pachinko parlours. That isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

p.s. What Kraaze said.

48

The analogy doesn’t quite work. In gambling, extracting money out of the skill-based games is very, very difficult as the savvy players go out of their way to avoid paying to the house whenever they can (by, say, setting up poker games outside casinos, legally or otherwise.) Extracting money out of the slots players is much more straightforward.

The reverse is true of the video game industry, believe it or not. Casual gamers can be lucrative, but only if you can attract them to your game. And attracting that kind of player is very, very expensive, since casual players by definition don’t really give a damn about games and are easily distracted by other activities. So companies must spend vast amounts of money on marketing to bring in the masses.

Hardcore gamers, on the other hand, really, really want to give the industry their money. They spend far more per person than their casual brethren – not just a little bit more, but orders of magnitude more.They will do crazy things like put up perfectly good money months in advance for a pre-release or pay to be in a beta. They educate themselves about games, so publishers don’t have to spend as much on marketing. Better still the hardcore gamers will turn around and promote the games they like to other people by making Web sites and mods.

Hardcore gamers are also finicky and outspoken and often annoying to deal with, but the key thing is they spend a lot on the business and they are very dependable. A financial analyst can figure out, with fair degree of certainty, exactly how much money Halo 4 will bring in. No one can say how much Farmville 2 will earn, or even if people will be playing Farrmville a couple of years from now.

The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence, and since this board is mostly hardcore gamers and game makers it’s not surprising people here are saying, Wow, I wish hardcore games had the amount of players and attention casual games get. I’m just saying that there are casual game developers out there–particularly the ones that haven’t hit the level of success a Pop Cap or Zynga has–who are saying, Wow, I wish casual games had an audience that was as dependable a source of revenue as hardcore gamers.

49

What about those who are for neither?

50

Reldan describes a situation that I think is partly accurate as far as it goes. The difference is that in the casino scenario the house is tilting all in favor of one product verus another-table games vs. slots. In video gaming both sides can win.

There’s a couple things I’ve noticed through the years.

  1. Hardcores tend not to like casuals very much. There’s sort of a white trash sentiment when looking down at the casuals in hardcore communities. Stop denying it. You’ve seen it.
  2. There are many, many more casuals than hardcores. So while hardcores might set the bar for performance (and they generate a lot of word of mouth, too) if you want real return there needs to be a hook for the casuals.
  3. Because of 2) casual gamers can be very good for hardcores. A game that has a huge user base has a better budget for improvement and new content. One that is a niche competitor with only a part of the hardcore market won’t have the kind of development ability as one with a wider expected and then realized appeal.

A good example of this is World of Warcraft when it was released. It was designed to be easily accessible to casual and hardcore players. It could be played easily for the casuals but also had plenty of stats and optimization challenges to keep the hardcores engaged. If you didn’t want to raid or pvp you didn’t have to, but it was there if you wanted. You might not be able to get through it with a casual guild, but thems were the breaks. The hardcores (and also casuals who played a lot just farming and whatnot) drove the economy through the AH and made for a better-rounded play experience. If the odd casual thought they were treated meanly by someone who thought of themselves as hardcore, or if the odd hardcore got angry because of what was perceived as too many noobs clogging a quest area, it didn’t destabilize the overall environment.

Result: Blizzard makes a ton of money because millions of players of varying devotion and skill can co-exist in their game. Not everyone gets to see the whole game, true, but there’s plenty to keep everyone engaged and paying their monthly subscription. So not slots vs. table games. More like the “old Vegas” model of having the guys (hardcores) all crowded around the craps tables while their wives (casuals) played away at the slots or bingo. Everybody won, so to speak. Without constraints of “floorspace” in a game, game companies can accommodate both groups, and have superior profitability if they do.

The above is not the situation in WoW now. That is a whole different discussion. I’m talking about the scenario as it existed basically through Burning Crusade.

51

No, you’re not the only one, I get that.

However, I’m not sure it’s only because of casual games, it’s because gaming is changing, and in many ways not for the better. But I don’t think this is solely because of casual games. Games have been changing before that. How much of a factor casual games are in this change I can’t say.

For instance, PC gamer culture, although not dead, seems to be much less important. That, I think, is a fact, and I don’t like it. However, that’s not only because of casual games, it’s also because the non-casual console market is much more important, among other things.

Note that I’m not saying that console games inherently worse, but PC games had something specific to them, which rarely appears in console games.

Part of me wants to be reasonable and say that casual games can only add diversity and expand the medium, but the other part of me sees the waning of many types of games I like, and I notice that not all change is necessarily good. Some games are getting too simple, and not in a good way. Take Dawn of War 2 for instance. I loved the game, but didn’t think it was nearly as good as Company of Heroes, and part of it was that there simply weren’t as many cool things you could do in the game, it god old much faster (I’m specifically talking about the multiplayer). When I look at how Supreme Commander has changed from 1 to 2, I can’t say I’m happy about it. This is clearly an effect of games being expanded to broader audiences, partly because of the success of the Wii and DS, partly because of casual games. So in the end I have a hard time accepting the argument that casual games are not having a negative impact on some game cultures.

What I don’t think is that traditional games will cease to exist. As much as this is a business, I think it only makes sense if at some proportion people create content that they’d like to play themselves. Also, despite what happened to some games, we still see stuff like Solium Infernum, ArmA, Mount and Blade and STALKER. There are less of them, they make less money, but they are still being made.

I also think that this general effort to make games more accessible won’t work for everyone. I still don’t understand what Supreme Commander did. Are they really going to sell much more? It often seems to me that streamlining games has become a sort of necessary bullet point in the minds of developers. I can’t count the interviews I read that said the exact same thing: “we are trying to reach broader audiences blah blah blah”.

52

It’s only a problem to those in the market segment being marginalized and beat out by the more lucrative majority (table gamers in my analogy). As you say, more customers are served and more money exchanges hands which I never argued wasn’t progress. It’s when the progress of one thing impedes the progress of something else that there’s a problem.

In terms of whether this is good for the industry depends on how dependable and/or fickle the casual audience is over the next decade. 27 years ago the entire video game industry crashed due to oversaturation of low quality games. The current management of the major publishers seem short-sighted enough to squander anything and everything to maximize short-term profits. Building a hardcore base means a smaller, but more reliable audience through lean times.

You are assuming the goal of gambling is for players to extract money. These are still games - the goal is to have fun. Some people can have fun with slots and others are bored with something so mindless - they need more thrill (Craps) or more skill (Poker, Blackjack) to enjoy the game. Is this so different than comparing Farmville to Starcraft or Halo?

I disagree with your point that it’s easier to extract money from hardcore gamers than casual gamers.

Casual games are cheap and fast to make, can make a quick profit, and then die off to be replaced by other cheap, fast games. It’s all quantity and a lot of small transactions from people who don’t really care all that much that add up. Combining these games with social networking to provide low-cost or free marketing was the masterstroke - there’s no vast amount of money being spent on marketing - they’ve crowdsourced it. Little risk and a lot of reward.

Hardcore games are about making hits - the investments costs of which are immense. Yes, hardcore gamers want to give the industry their money, but they are a demanding bunch full of expectations. Hardcore gamers pick a few games each year and latch on, leaving the rest to rot as dismal failures. Lots of risk for a lot of reward.

I think Casual gamers are the easier group to extract profit from.

I fully agree that both sides CAN win, but I disagree that they WILL win. It is not because Blackjack wasn’t profitable that casinos changed the rules, but because it wasn’t profitable enough. The future of the industry is in the hands of guys like Bobby Kotick.

53

You’ve got it exactly backward, as usual on this board. Hardcore gamers are the ones who buy lots and lots of games each year, and produce a fairly dependable 1 million+ sales for any decent hardcore game. Casual gamers are the ones who are very hard to reach and who focus on just a few games, leaving the rest to rot as dismal failures as you put it.

54

Maybe, maybe not. But casual games are way cheaper to make, so you can afford a few misses. As for the AAA games, does anyone have a good number on the ratio of hits to misses?

55

The lower cost won’t help you in the casual space because you’ll also see much lower revenue on misses (lower sales plus lower price). The hits are potentially much bigger than for hardcore games but they are also much, much rarer. That’s what the big publishers already discovered to their consternation when they tried to make money with cheap casual games on the Wii. Angry bald space marine shooters in the AAA budget range are really the most dependable way to make money with video games.

56

You still haven’t established that there is a problem. You have established that the direction of progress is not one you personally like but that’s the way it goes for people with niche tastes. I’m sure people who really enjoyed riding horses weren’t too pleased with how the automobile relegated their activity to an expensive niche hobby. It doesn’t mean that the introduction of the automobile was a problem. Quite the opposite, it was a great advance with a ton of benefits.

Any industry can fall into the trap of making short sighted decisions because everyone else is doing it and they can’t all be wrong. I really don’t see that as at all related to the specific topic of casual games.

57

The point is that Reldan brilliantly illustrated what is happening to table games (e.g. games I like) due to slot machines.

Usually the major opinion was that the rise of casual gaming will NOT interfere with those games but instead pull in more people into serious gaming once introduced by casual games.
This is clearly not the case and that is important to be aware of.
The rise of casual games have a negative effect on “table games” no one can deny that anymore.

There is not much one can do but utter his / her displeasure with the route the industry is taking.
Mainly I buy a lot of indie games these days often mainly to support genres / game types I like and want to see continued.

58

Eh, just wait a while. Lots of developers want to reach that huge casual audience but most of them are in for a rude surprise. It’s really extremely difficult to sell video games to people who don’t have any particular interest in them. Look at the huge disparity between Nintendo vs everyone else on the Wii. Casuals latch onto one big thing as one big herd, and if you’re not that one big thing you’re not going to sell anything.

I’m sure the developers will all come back to their good old dependable hardcore audience in time. Maybe they will adopt some changes like easier difficulty levels to make their games approachable to a bigger slice of the hardcore audience… but that’s a good thing as far as I’m concerned.

59

Who’s for a Crackdown or Borderlands MMO?

60

Meh, the analogy works for me only if the table gamblers all expect Vegas to forever stay like 1963.

I’m not seeing the slots jammed between your tables, either. If you don’t like Mario Galaxy, don’t play it. How is it getting in your face?

This isn’t even about “mature” shooters and action games getting crowded out of the market. You can’t swing a stick without knocking over a stack of them.

I think it’s more about resentment, the idea that this just isn’t the way gaming was supposed to cross into the mainstream.