Ugh.
I hope most publishers aren't trying to choose between making "casual" and "hardcore" games, since neither exist.
Nintendo's big games this past quarter were Mario Kart Wii, which obviously can be played by both long-time gamers and new gamers, and Wii Fit, which, despite being called "casual" is not a downmarket title at all, but rather the upmarket of the new market established by Wii Sports and Play.
Pretty much every western publisher has a Wii Sports 2 type game on the market right now, and pretty much all of them are selling well. What's going to happen though, of course, is this market segment is going to become oversaturated, and then Nintendo will take it over anyways with Wii Fit and Wii Sports Resort, because those games offer new experiences and don't treat the customers like retards. Anyone focusing on, say, Game Party 3 or Sports Party 2 as the lynchpin of their "casual" efforts, will see their sales slowly drop and their costs rise as they try to compete.
If publishers keep going out to "follow Nintendo's lead," and basically make the dumbed-down sequels to Nintendo's games, they're just going to slowly oversaturate the new markets Nintendo has exposed, but never get in on the growth part of the curve. Publishers need to try and CREATE the new segments, like FF7, RE1+2, GTAIII and EA's Sports titles did over the last 2 gens.
On DS, third parties aren't quite there yet, but they've done the next best thing. After oversaturating the "brain game" and "pet sim" segments, they're now providing games like Guitar Hero, Grand Theft Auto and Dragon Quest. Although these games don't create new markets, they do focus on markets which have been underserved on DS, which will make them the best selling third party DS games yet.
And that example of EA's 40 games for Wii and DS... Ugh. Show some evidence. At launch, EA said they had 30 PS3 games in development. ( http://www.gamespot.com/news/6160151.html ) Those must have all been "casual" too.
Actually, a lot of the increase in development for DS and Wii from EA is from bringing all the sports titles over to Wii, and from a whole slew of DS/Wii exclusive Sim games, including MySims Kingdom, MySims Party, SimAnimals, SimCity Creator, and so far, Spore. There's also the Hasbro games and some other "casual" titles, of course, but it's actually three of four divisions, the Casual, Sims and Sports divisions, which are all selling out to Wii and DS.
"[Our former customers] are unable to find software which they WANT to play."
"The way to solve this problem lies in how to communicate what kind of games [they CAN play]."
Satoru Iwata, Nintendo President. Only slightly paraphrased.
