What is your definition of 'core gaming'. Mine seems unpopular.

[Salnax]

I think the term "core" refers to players as opposed to the games themselves.

 

Basic Gamer Categories

• Nongamer - Person with little to no experience with games, aka my grandmother who has trouble opening Solitaire. Unless you're doing a "Blue Ocean" kind of thing, they are mostly irrelevant. Though my grandmother did help me get my first console when I was a kid, an N64. That was nice of her.
• Casual - Person with experience with games, but with minimal time or money invested into the medium. The iPhone owner who ocassionally whips out Angry Birds fits here. This is a large category, and can be considered as an untapped market that can transition into a new game/genre/platform given the incentive.
• Core - Buys and/or plays games on a regular basis, and may actually follow games media and anticipate releases, but has a limited amount of knowledge outside of a few favorite games or genres. They are often responsible for the bulk of a game's sales, especially many of the big AAA releases that come out on a regular basis.
• Hardcore - Typically consider gaming to be one's primary hobby, and typically are the leaders in purchasing the newest hardware. These guys are most important early in a product's life, since their nod of approval is often necessary for the product to become better known among other categories.

There are another few important categories, which are less mutually exclusive than those above.

• Professional - Gamers who play games with an intense knowledge of a game's workings, to the extent where they may be paid for their efforts. This mostly includes those who compete in competitive tournaments.
• Retro - Places an emphasis on playing older games, typically ranging from the late 70's to mid 90's. They are more likely to play games using the original hardware, such as playing Super Mario World on the SNES as opposed to a Virtual Console or GBA port. Retro gamers may simply enjoy the older games, in which case they are more likely to use emulation in order to play more games, or might prefer specific genres and/or styles that were used at the time, which may result in them buying newer games with Retro elements.
• Elitist - A sort of mixture of Core and Hardcore elements, the Elitist plays games as a primary hobby, and thus spend both larges amounts of time and money on gaming, but is remarkable for staying within a fairly small range, possibly based on genre and style. This often occurs alongside with a derision for other categories of games, but could simply be a case of highly specific taste, like somebody who watches tons of action movies and little else. Common centers of "Elitism" include realistic shooters, games developed in specific countries, indie games, MMO's, etc. Despite the term "Elitist" sounding derrogatory, and encompassing widely disliked groups such as "Weeaboos," "Bros,"  this category mostly exists to show particularly narrow investment as opposed to passing a judgement.
• Roleplayer - Often, though not always, associated with the RPG genre, these gamers make extra efforts to immerse themselves in a game by modifying their behavior to act in hoiw they their avatar would behave. These are fairly common in open world RPG's, such as recent Bethesda games, as well as MMO's, where they may congregate on specific servers.
• Challenge - Usually a sub-category of another form of gamer, Challenge Gamers place specific extra rules or conditions on a gaming experience. This ranges from people who still care about high scores or want to complete a game without killing any NPC's to speedrunners who will put the knowledge of many Elitists to shame.

 

Games can only be judged based off of how well they do appealing to these groups.