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HappySqurriel on 26 June 2011
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RolStoppable said:
Kantor said:

It actually surprises me that so many people are agreeing with this.

First, I will make it clear that I do believe that it's possible to make a good casual game. However, the large majority of casual games are absolute garbage. "But" you protest, "the majority of hardcore games are absolute garbage, too!"

Exactly right.

The difference is that hardcore crap fails, and casual crap doesn't necessarily. Has any terrible hardcore game enjoyed the success of Carnival Games? Please, nobody answer that question with "Modern Warfare 2", because as much as some people hate it, it is at least liked by the majority of people and the gaming media.

I should make it clear as well that I hate on every company who does this in equal measure. Microsoft, Nintendo, Sony, EA, Ubisoft, Activision, whoever it may be. There is nothing wrong with making a good game aimed at casual audiences. There is, however, something deeply wrong with making crap aimed at casual audiences.

So, the reasons I dislike bad casual games:

1) They divert resources away from good games
2) They often end up selling disproportionately well
3) The company is fully aware that they are terrible and releases them anyway.

I don't think Sesame Street is going to be like that. I do think Disneyland Adventures is going to be like that.

On the subject of terrible hardcore games:

I checked Metacritic to see how Carnival Games fared (your example) and how well good "casual" games did, like Wii Sports Resort, Sports Champions and Wii Fit. Well, CG stands at 56, but the ceiling for "casual" games seems to be at around 80 points, because no matter how good they are, apparently gaming journalists will never hand out higher scores. Compare that to "hardcore" games which can score up to 100 points, so roughly 20 points higher than "casual" games. Logically, if Carnival Games is crappy by scoring a 56, then so are "hardcore" games that come in at the 75 points mark or lower. I think that's fair.

Knowing that, it doesn't pose much of a challenge to find crappy "hardcore" games that didn't fail in the marketplace. Homefront, Need for Speed (Pro Street and Undercover) and many more. Last generation we had stuff like Driv3r and Enter the Matrix selling multiple million copies and the former scored about the same as Carnival Games. Had Driv3r been a "casual" game, then it would have scored only around 35 points on all platforms.

I also disagree with your reasoning why you dislike bad "casual" games, aside from the third point which is correct. But:

1) The teams that are assigned to bad "casual" games have no or not much talent in the first place. It doesn't matter what they make, it's always going to be a subpar product.

2) That is not the case. For every Carnival Games there are at least a hundred other titles that failed. The batting average is terrible, but that has always been conveniently ignored in order to label the Wii a shovelware machine. Quite simple, if there actually were many success stories like Carnival Games, then people would be able to name more than Carnival Games and Game Party in such arguments. It should be clear to everyone that third party companies try to go the easiest route and Kinect shows clearly that there weren't many of these bad "casual" games on the Wii that had any noteworthy staying power. Otherwise, they too would have made their way to Kinect, like CG and GP already did.


There is one point you forgot to make ...

While the "casual" games may be low quality when judged against the standards that dictate quality for core games, the best-selling "casual" games are among the highest quality games that are similar to them.

Hypothetically speaking, if we reversed the situation where all "Hard-core" games were being developed by mediocre teams on a small budget, and "casual games were being developed by the best teams with a massive budget, it would probably not be unusual to find the best-selling "Hard-Core" games receiving very poor scores when judged based on the values of "Casual" games.