Borkachev on 02 May 2008
On top of that GTA is a casual title. Lately people have started attributing the term "casual game" to minigame compilations with waggle but that's not accurate at all. GTA has always been more of a casual title which explains how the worst selling GTA on PS2 outsold the best selling FF by close to 3 million.
As a huuuge Grand Theft Auto fan I have to say that you're totally missing the boat, here. GTA is pretty much the defining example of a casual game.
You guys are confusing casual games with mainstream games. "Mainstream" refers to games that reach a broad audience of people outside of the usual core of gamers. "Casual" has little to do with audience, although casual games happen to appeal mostly to the mainstream audience. What actually defines a casual game isn't its audience, but its accessibility and simplicity of function. A casual game has only a few game mechanics, while a non-casual game might have thousands. Minesweeper is a casual game. Wii Sports is casual. So is Solitaire, WarioWare, and just about any puzzle game in existence.
Even though it sells to a huge mainstream audience, GTA is not casual. In fact, it's pretty much at the extreme opposite end as far as number of gameplay mechanics goes (though it's still quite accessible). The same goes for Gran Turismo -- it sells millions, but it's not a casual game. (The main simulation mode, at least, certainly isn't. The arcade mode is to a certain extent). Or look at something like Puzzle Quest -- it takes a simple puzzle game, which would normally be casual, and turns it into something much more complex (hardcore) by adding a bunch of RPG elements. What categorizes each of these games isn't their sales/mainstream appeal, but their style of gameplay. For an example from the other side, an Xbox version of Checkers would still be casual even if it sold extremely poorly. It just wouldn't be mainstream.
Now, all of this is confused by the fact that the broad mainstream audience is sometimes called "casual gamers." But casual gamers don't only play casual games. The term just means that they play games as an occasional hobby rather than on a daily basis. Casual gamers are the ones who play Wii Sports at a friend's house, then go out and buy one themselves. After a couple months they pick up Zelda because their buddy told them to, but they still only turn it on every couple of weekends for an hour.
About the only other thing to keep in mind is that casual games aren't necessarily shallow. For instance, Checkers, which I mentioned above, is extremely casual but also allows for some very deep strategy that takes years to master. The difference is that casual games bury their depth beneath a few simple mechanisms, while hardcore games gain depth (though not exclusively) though adding more and more complicated mechanisms: for instance, an RPG with hundreds of different abilities, stats, and unique sidequests.
