You can get competitive within any system, regardless of how simplistic it is. The point is accessibility and the ability of people to pick it up and play.

No, being a long-time gamer does not give you rights to special treatment in terms of development. There aren't enough people who demand closed off, inaccessible experiences to make them a viable market.

That's all there is.

Then make it simple, make it accessible, and make it balanced. Don't make it watered, don't make it random, and don't make it so shallow. Those are two very different things. Unfortunately, most Dev's and people prefer the latter.

It's true that you don't need complexity to make a great competitive game, but it needs to be deep.

I'm saying that you operate on a level that the vast majority of people do not care about and that the vast majority of gamers have never cared about. You are not part of a dying breed. The competitive gamer has always been a niche.

I don't think you can quantify being water down. Random is one thing - but watered down? Nah.

Lack of depth will not stop a scene from being highly competitive, if that's what you want.

But, again, it doesn't matter. You're not part of a market big enough to change things. You never have been, so long as you have held this view. That's just how it is.

god of war... intellectually stimulating?

Why don't we just leave the hardcore term for porn? At least hardcore porn has a definitive answer that will not be constantly debated. I think I have seen at least 50 definitions of hardcore gaming and that tells me it's all personal opinion.

I think you get it completly wrong - naming somoene as casual gamer is way of at least pretending those people who play wii fit or solitare whole day are part of big gamers family  and refers to someone who plays things pretending to be games.

Layton for me looks just like a collection of riddles and not a game you can experience.

So for me it's rather easy to see distinguishing line beetween those:

Profesor Layton - casual,  Ace attorney- hardcore game

Animal Crossing/Sims/Spore - casual , Sim City - hardcore

Wii Sports - casual,  Grand Slam Tennis - Hardcore etc.

It doesn't have anything to do with the platform as you can name casual games on PC (sims , spore) , ps3 (buzz, singstar) or x360 (1 vs 100, lips).

Through I guess it can be also used as pejorative term on a such politically correct forum as VGC when people are afraid of saying what they really think due to admin censorship.

Example: God of War is garbage!

Well, at least it isn't neither "intellectually stimulating" or "pick up and play".

XD XD XD

Let me guess, "Games are art"?

That top line just proves my point. You try to differentiate yourself from your fellow gamers by insulting them. Fortunately, they are nice enough to not care what you say about them.

It is a game, and you can't change that just by whining. It is a collection of riddles, joined together by a plot and a method of travelling between areas. It has a defined win condition. IT IS A GAME, GROW UP!

As for your definitions for those games, just stop talking. Those definitions have nothing to do with core/casual, it's simply a rating of which games YOU like.

Belive whatever you want i'm sure we didn't call solitare/minesweeper players "gamers"in 1990s and gaming was more or less always "elittist" form of entertainment compared to mundane watching tv in the same way as playing pen&paper rpgs etc was.