Core gamer market is saturated, devs/pubs need to embrace casual gaming

[bdbdbd]

hunter_alien said:

bdbdbd said:
Although i don't completely disagree, since the "core gamer" is getting less and less new games, in form of longer developement times and in form of sequels that basically are just new levels to the previous games (but hey, the graphics are better!), which causes people to focus more on games that they see "good" and play them more online.
So it may be saturated in terms of how varied the "core gamers" games are, or the lack of it.
But, there's also the thing, that the "core gamers" too play with the Wii.

Observation itself wasn't bad, but how it was read was. Edit: @Toasty: You're right, but only telling half of the truth. While 3rd parties are hardly making money with Wii, they aren't doing any with other consoles. In fact, they are just losing money. Look at EA for example, while their focus has been PS360, they are only making heavy losses at the same time when smaller devs have focused on Wii and are doing better than ever. Like Grasshopper or Atlus for example.

 Wow , I actually agree with this hairy guy :o Yes , there are probably less core gamers then there where before , and the best example is the games difficulty level going down . 

Well thank you. Although i'd like to take credit, i must admit that what i said was largely pointed out by Iwata years back. Actually since you mentioned "core gamers", when the market expands, the core group changes to the direction where the market is expanding, since "core" is just a definition for people who pay all this fun. The thing that is happening, is that the previous core group of gamers is just making room for the new ones, or not even that (in relation to this article), is also finding new ways to play games. Just like every single time there's been major changes in the market. I definately agree that the games are going more easy direction. Some of the gaming media made notions couple of years back, that the campains in games are just becoming tutorials for playing them online. But making games easier is the way to expand the audience, while most developers fail in this. Their mistake is to make the games first for the "core" audince and then try to lower the entry point to play their game, while they should have made a low entry point in the first place and then build the game for the "core gamers", just like Starcraft.