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Smashchu2 on 11 June 2010
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WereKitten said:
Smashchu2 said:

First, let me start that this is no such thing as "casuals," and "hardcore." They are just buzz workds and have no meaning. "Casual," just refers to a "lesser," gamer. "Hardcore," is anything someone likes. People call old NES games like Super Mario Brothers "hardcore," even though they are more casual (you can warp and beat it in about an hour).

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The point was about casual and hardcore gamers, not games. Referring to people and their activities the terms casual and hardcore are actually quite well defined. A casual movie-goer is someone who goes to the cinema according to trends, pressures and personal inclinations but has no particular investment in the activity when compared to other aspects of his/her life. A hardcore skater is someone for whom the activity has surged to a central role, thus a lot of time, attention, money and effort goes in it. So much that they develops a high fidelity to the activity, which is why they also tend to constitute a hardcore market in the business sense.

What Reasonable said, which I agree with, is that PS1/PS2 expanded gaming to people who never gamed before, save the mandatory one-off activity with a younger nephew, son or geeky friend. The typical children playing NES and Atari games were actually hardcore gamers, as all children are devoted to their games and PC gamers were a more varied marked, with adults playing flight and war simulators, but they were generally tagged with the stigma of geekdom. With PS1 I remember seeing for the first time adults buying a console to play football games with adult friends. And a surge of the family oriented genre.

Hardcore is rarely used in business. You can refere to your normal business as core, but I would be hard pressed to puit customers in categories. It will tend to create tunnel vision.

The bold is wrong. Out side of population growths, the PS1/PS2 didn't add many people. It was not an expansion of games but games riding the hight tide of good economies and other things. The three major factors that made the PS1 and PS2 generations successus

  • Population growth (which is now down turing in Japan and many European nations)
  • Expanding globaly (The PS1 was the first system to be a success in all major regions. The NES never took off in Europe)
  • Gamers having higher disposable income (a lot of gamers were carrying over. They had more money then they did when they were kids, so they could buy more games and systems. This is what lead to multiple console ownership)

I think I posted this already in this thread, but I'll do it again if not. Reggie, before the Wii was shown, gave a speach about the state of the industry. Most of the data showed declines all around. Japan's market was down. Young males were plaing fewer games. Household penetration was the lowest in the PS2 era. So gaming has not been growing. It has been shrinking.

Also, all gamers on the Atari and NES were noit hardcore. They were all just starting into games. There was no strong market before. The hardcore gamers during the NES days were on the game dedicated PCs which were 16 bit at the time. NES games and gamers were casual as they were designed for short burst of play. The real hardcore gamers were playing longer role playing games on conputers.