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Louie on 19 July 2016
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Soundwave said:
Louie said:

When people like Rol and I say we want a mass market console we don't mean we want shitty games. Wii Sports Resort, Mario Kart Wii and Mario Bros. Wii were high quality games and still attracted a casual audience, just like Tetris, Mario Land, etc. (heck, the original Pokemon was a casual game unless millions of 6-10 year olds count as hardcore gamers now). This picture illustrates the point: 

What we want is the dog. What Ubisoft makes is the play-thingy on the right side. That's what is upsetting him. Unfortunately casual gaming has become so synonymous on gaming forums with "low quality games" that people often think we want that as well. 

Which casual games, even those from Nintendo, are held in the same esteem as "core" games. Even for Nintendo's casual games, nobody is putting Brain Training or Wii Fit in the same category as Zelda or Mario Galaxy. 

Casual games are not really ever going to have the higher tier "quality" because that would mean the play mechanics are complex and more challenging/time intensive, and that doesn't work in the context of casual gaming most of the time. 

Super Mario Bros? Mario Kart? Pokemon? These are all mass market franchises. You just don't see them as such because your definition of a casual game is "low quality". But I'm not arguing with this. Most mass market games will never be seen as high quality as core games by hardcore gamers. That's absolutely true. But you can still make high quality mass market games like Super Mario, Pokemon, Wii Sports, Wii Fit, Animal Crossing and so on.

It's not about casual gaming. It's about correctly implementing the theory of disruption into a business model. Disruptive technology is one of the most well researched topics of business with a sample size of over 320,000 companies across hundreds of industries. It works. And it worked in the console market as well. Casual gamers have different criteria for the quality of a game. For some people ease of use, a social multiplayer experience and quick gaming sessions are more important than depth of gameplay. The point is when Ubisoft says "Casual games" what they really mean is "bad games we try to shove down uninformed customer's throats". And that's annoying.