I really think the concept of core and casual is completely flawed, for one there should be at least three categories the traditional core, the traditional casual and the expanded market.
A lot of people seem to exclude anyone who gamed before this generation from being casual but there's always been casual gamers and the best selling games have always been casual friendly.
Games like COD, GTA and Sports titles are all pretty casual friendly and on the Nintendo side you have titles like Mario and Pokemon. These games are all really open to casual players although they're completely different, but the thing about these games are they also appeal to the hardcore fanbases on the consoles. The people getting to their 10th prestige in COD, collecting every star in Mario, catching every Pokemon, these are all hardcore gamers.
In all honesty very few purely hardcore games are successful, at least massively successful. The majority of the big "hardcore" games are pretty much based around being casual friendly and at the same time allowing for someone to play it "hardcore".
As in that's why I think Mario, COD, Pokemon, Halo, Tetris and GTA are all so successful, they manage to appeal to more than just one of the two camps that people see the industry as.
So I guess what I'm trying to say is that the best strategy is a combination of both but not by trying to appeal to them individually but by making games like I mentioned above. Not that there's anything wrong with pure casual or pure hardcore games, but for a console manufacturer they won't sell that many units. I mean if you can make a game more streamlined and casual friendly without lessening the experience for the hardcore (Driving assists in racing games) or vice versa then it just makes the game better
