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The Folly of Pigeon-Holing Gamers
Editor's Note: Any Edge blogger whose work is promoted to front-page Keynote status automatically wins one full year's subscription to Edge magazine. Just so you know...
In economics, the difference between a core user and a casual user of a product is quite clear. The key variable is simply how much time one spends with the item.
The core user completely integrates the product in his daily life either as a hobby or a tool, makes the most use of its key features, is more likely to explore the secondary aspects of it, sometimes thinks about how it could be improved, talks about it to his peers, and usually grows fond of the product because he believes it enhances his life in some manner. By opposition, the casual user does not regularly spend time with the said product and does not have such a thorough use of it. The latter is more volatile and has not completely assimilated the product in his routine.
In economics, the difference between a core user and a casual user of a product is quite clear. The key variable is simply how much time one spends with the item.
The core user completely integrates the product in his daily life either as a hobby or a tool, makes the most use of its key features, is more likely to explore the secondary aspects of it, sometimes thinks about how it could be improved, talks about it to his peers, and usually grows fond of the product because he believes it enhances his life in some manner. By opposition, the casual user does not regularly spend time with the said product and does not have such a thorough use of it. The latter is more volatile and has not completely assimilated the product in his routine.
The “core vs casual” differentiation is somewhat of a marketing concept that illustrates the “80-20” economic rule. You make 80% of your business with 20% of your clients and vice versa. Because, let’s face it, the core users group is also where a good chunk of the profit is, provided you have a good strategy to convert their passion into dollars. In theory, the core user of an iPhone is who will spend the most in service fees. The core user of a pizza delivery service is who will order the most pizze. The core user of a porn web site is the compulsive masturbator who will subscribe for the whole year. The core user of a drug is an addict. The core user of a game console is who will buy the most games and peripherals [if he is not a big time pirate]. He is who pushes the attach rate up.
In the gaming jargon though, the term “hardcore gamer” has evolved in the early nineties when adopted by the console community to refer to their co-opted elite. It’s a blurry word that would somehow apply to a superior breed of gamers who supposedly would know more about games because they spend more time on them. It’s the western pendent of the Japanese “Gemu Otaku”. The latter spends time and coins in the arcades like if it was the only form of entertainment available in the streets of Tokyo, own all game systems, including some obscure stuff, which he purchased on launch day… They live and breathe video games. It is often assumed that a hardcore gamer finishes all the games he sets his mind to, or that for his hours of training and his veteran-like gameplay experience, he can get the hang of the control system of any new title thrown to him within a shorter time than the average person, that he reads and documents himself about games one way or another etc. In one sentence, the hardcore gamer knows the gaming culture better than the next guy.
Contradiction
The first problem I see there is that both definitions are not entirely compatible with one another and that they are deemed to create confusion. See, when an exec at a game firm speaks about core gamers, he speaks about customers who spend the most dollars on games. Full stop. When he speaks about casual gamers, he means they are billions of people who have less time and/or money to spend on games, either because they are busy, or because they don’t like it as much, or because they are new to the hobby, or because they are pirates. He doesn’t particularly think that all core gamers are educated and read Edge. He doesn’t assume that core gamers have been around since the Famicom days.
In other words, the businessman realizes that every generation brings in new core gamers who may have different tastes than the previous generation of core gamers. He will not assume automatically that the ones who helped build the market in the past have the priority to get the traditional genres they are accustomed to just because they can claim seniority. This is where some old school gamers will already feel let down or betrayed by the companies they once loved and supported, when a title that doesn’t appeal to them personally is outrageously labeled “core game” by the maker.
The misunderstanding will only grow deeper when the industry folks start wanting to cater to so-called “casual gamers”, stacking together in that blurry category a huge bunch of customers who assumedly prefer to play simpler games by the five minute session. To me, it becomes more than a linguistic problem when for a year and a half, the entire gaming microcosm polarizes itself around the debate, be it in the media, in business meetings, or on web forums. You’re creating among potential consumers a theoretical dichotomy that otherwise doesn’t exist in practice. As in: the casual gamer is an illusion, there is no such demographic.
Attracting new crowds
When Nintendo announced they wanted to attract new gamers, it wasn’t such a disruptive statement as some may think. Every game system released since 1983 bases its success on attracting new gamers in addition to keeping the old customers upgrading to the nextgen. The only originality in Nintendo’s 2006 strategy is that they integrated the non-gamer earlier than usual in their communication strategy (before release date, not in the third year of the lifecycle), and kept him or her in mind during the development process, focusing on making the control scheme more accessible, yet sufficiently innovative to amaze the veteran gamer who hasn’t been surprised in a while.
When men and women aged 7 to 77 started buying Wii and NDS as if they were a commodity, it took several gamesworld insiders by surprise. To the point that some editors are still figuring out how to talk about the phenomenon, while many third-party publishers CEOs are puzzled about how to react to this strange fact. It slowly became assumed that these new people must be interested in new types of games. It’s somehow true. But it is also true that for them a Gran Turismo is about as new and fresh as a Carnival Games since they haven’t been playing anything before: they were non-gamers. Plus, it is also true that so-called hardcore gamers on previous systems have always been begging for more originality and new ideas too. So, this assumption somehow shouldn’t matter too much…
What matters more is when game makers start to assume that because WiiPlay and WiiSports are popular, the new generation gamers would only like to play mini-games compilations for the rest of their lives. Now THAT is completely wrong and is actually damaging for the video games culture and marketplace in more ways than you imagine.
I was born in 1977. Back then we were all non-gamers. One year later came Space Invaders. It turned millions of Japanese into casual gamers. A short while later, the success of the first-ever shoot’em up was such that it triggered a coin shortage across the island. It makes me think some of these Japanese people must have turned from non-gamer into core gamers without transition, wouldn’t you agree? And among all these newbies-turned-core, I’m pretty convinced some eventually have put coins in other games that were not about shooting octopus aliens. My first game was Decathlon on Commodore 64. I’ve played other games than Track’n’Field or Mario & Sonic Olympics in the meantime.
If your first Wii game is Wii Sports, because delivered with the console, and the second one is Wii Play, because you needed a second controller, does it mean you will spend the rest of your life play EA Playground, Rayman Raving Rabbids 3 and Mario Party 8? If you buy WiiFit, do you want another fitness/yoga program two months later while you’re still following the routine from the original title, or would you rather see how Ski goes on the balance board? If the first book you buy and love is Moby Dick, you won’t end up owning an entire library solely comprising books about whales, right? Why would it be any different with games?
My point is: everybody has been or will be a newbie gamer once; yet nobody stays a newbie gamer for long. Unfortunately, by labeling the newbie “casual”, you write in stones a customer status that is no longer valid in two months of time. Either the newbie becomes core (from a business point of view, I am not saying he is an otaku all of a sudden) or he goes back to being a non-gamer for long lapses of time if not forever. One thing is for sure, the first game he played and loved will not determine what types of games he wants to play in the next five years.
That is probably why system sellers are not always the same from one generation to the next. Resident Evil, Tekken, Ridge Racer, Crash Bandicoot shifted more systems than their sequels ever would. So did the original and unexpected Gran Theft Auto III five years later, which can be considered the re-birth of the GTA franchise as we know it today (in 3D, big budget development etc.) Street Fighter II, the title that arguably moved the most Super NES units, did not repeat its success on the next generation of consoles. On PS2, complete newcomers like Buzz and Singstar helped bringing the PlayStation brand to the level it is today across Europe. Animal Crossing, somewhat of a sleeper-hit on N64 and GameCube, is one of the handful titles that helped making the Nintendo DS a viral phenomenon, along with new franchises in the likes of Nintendogs or Brain Training. All these three titles have surpassed the 10 millions mark already. Gears of War moved quite a lot of 360s and so will LittleBigPlanet for the PS3, you can mark my words on this one.
Let it be clear that I don’t mind sequels when they innovate on the previous iteration and bring the franchise or the genre to a higher level. I do hate clones though. Some companies still seem to think that piggybacking the last Christmas hit will gather them the same kind of success as said Christmas hit. Right? Wrong! You don’t want for next Christmas what you got last Christmas… because you don’t need two games that look and feel the same more than you need two pink ties made by different stylists.
Mass-market necessity
The success of any hardware platform has never been entirely reliant on hardcore gamers, opposite to what the latter [want to] believe. Only the early success is. The first few millions of units rely indeed on the early adopters. The latter are by definition core gamers. First of, because they are aware of the system early in the advertisement cycle. Also because they are willing to accept higher prices, buying the system from first production runs, before some scale economy effect cuts the retail tag… thanks to their purchases. The strategic importance of early adopters is nothing more than that: bring the price down to a mass market point. Then the real show can begin.
What makes a system win a console war and reach the 100 millions mark is mainstream acceptance indeed. The millions of self-proclaimed hardcore gamers who live and breathe games are important for your business because of their high attach-rate and because they are the ones who get the party started. But a NES, a Super NES, a PlayStation, a PlayStation 2, a Gameboy Color, a Nintendo DS have become the sales powers that they are or have been only thanks to so-called “mass market penetration”. They attracted non-gamers, like the banker, the mom, the little brother, the news anchor, the nextdoor neighbor, the talk-show host, the hip hop star, the rockstar, the pornstar, the football player, the cool guy at school, the little nephew, the girlfriend and turned all of them into newbie gamers, a share of them graduating later to core gamers.
If the Wii or the Xbox 360 or the PlayStation 3 aim to achieve such a critical level of success, they will also inevitably need this eclectic crowd. It’s what kept the industry growing so far: every generation recuperates the core gamers from the previous ones, while bringing in new converts and trying to re-conquer lost love. You need them all to be the winner: the hardcore and the casual, the football fan and the music freak, the car lover and the wannabe gangster. That is why there is no such thing as “the killer-app”, “the” game that will install your base. There only can be the right assortment of titles that will deliver such a large and deep panel of choices that it will keep all existing core gamers satisfied, while converting newly arrived users into core gamers too.
A console is a platform, a marketplace, a closed economy if you will. It’s full of niches and trends within. In other words, a console is what you make out of it. Or at least what developers and publishers make of it. “If you build it, they will come.” A console is not a toaster that everybody will buy to toast bread or not buy at all. They buy the console because it reads the game(s) which appeals to them. People may buy a piece of hardware because of an innovative controller. But that doesn’t mean they want to wand it in the wind forever. Eventually they’ll buy a disc for the said hardware because, again, the software on the disc appeals to them. The software in question won’t appeal to them much if it’s a rinse and repeat of the disc(s) they already own.
The best approach to the Wii, for instance, is quite simple for third-parties. It’s the same approach they had for the NES, the Super NES, PlayStation and PlayStation 2. Just bring all you got on the leading system and cater to the entire spectrum range because it must be present on the platform… otherwise the platform wouldn’t be dominating the market around the globe now, would it? Time has come for third-party to stop the “casual” rhetoric behind which they usually hide cheap commercial ploys; time has come to bring the AAA titles of all genres to the fastest selling game system of the generation.
Diversity
You can’t just analyze a device that millions of people use in black and white. You have to nuance your opinions, as always when it comes to large populations located in dozens of different countries across the planet. A gamer is not core or casual. He is a human being with tastes, cultural influences, specific education, unique life experience, hobbies, passions, activities, time constraints, income, expenses, problems, joys, tragedies etc.
When a non-gamer arrives through interest for one particular game or genre, switching him from newbie gamer or specialty gamer into a broader core platform user solely depends on the diversity of your offer. We’ve established earlier that as long as third-party majors think that the success of the Nintendo mini-games means that there are lots of mini-games fans on the Wii, they’re misfiring. The mini-games were one major entry point this generation around: the title you get along the console to showcase to yourself and your buddies the magical powers of the new revolutionary controller. Passed that point, anybody wants to see what the ground-breaking Wiimote does with other types of games.
The question publishers ask themselves should be: now that 25 millions of people have bought a Wii and played mini-games on it, what else could these 25 millions of people want to experience with the Wiimote? The answers to that are obvious and quite the same as with any other controller really: swing blades or lightsabers, whip, spy, jump around, fly, solve puzzles, answer trivia quiz, drive, race, pilot, cook, simulate or emulate sports, touch music, dance, move lovely characters, get hooked to addictive concepts, discover new universes, pet creatures, create pets, evolve in imaginary worlds, play doctor, play lawyer, play fireman, play cop, play gangster, pretend to be a business manager, pretend to be a politician, save the day, characterize a super hero, act as a villain, rescue a princess, go in space, go in the future, go in the past, bomb things, defuse bombs, social network, wage war, end conflicts, arrest criminals, rob banks, practice martial arts, street fight, fish sharks, shoot zombies and nazis, transgress prohibitions, live up fantasies, listen to wonderful tales, laugh, have an adrenaline rush, bet on virtual horses, role-play, travel virtually… Anything entertaining to a sufficiently large group of people so that it makes it a viable enterprise if well executed. Like on any entertainment platform before and after that. Because there is a broad range of gamers demographics and frankly there always has been.
Nothing has really changed under the sun, except for who leads the video games industry. Sure there has been technological progress along the way, and the size of the market is increasing. But the way the market functions is still quite the same. The more diversified your software library is, the greater your chances to catch new gamers, the greater your chances to turn them into hardcore gamers, and also the more you please the hardcore gamers at the other end of spectrum. It’s a win-win-win. Do never forget you’re into the business of selling imagination. Yours better be worth a dollar then. Consumers are not lemmings, for the most part; it’s quite unfortunate that so many businessmen are. Adding insult to the injury, sometimes the latter believe the former to be. The condescendence of producers for “their stupid and/or ignorant customers” is a problem in all media industries. Be in Hollywood or within the games industry, enormous is the amount of edgy, intriguing, original projects that get killed by a suit ’n’ tie who’d rather go for the safe bet. Here is thinking this guy should be in oil or insurance business instead. You can hedge all you want, there is no such thing as a safe bet in the entertainment trade. If your aversion to risk is high, you should be selling something else.
Categorizing gamers
Separating the gamers in two big groups, core or casual, is like speaking about a spectrum of consumers in extremities. Unfortunately, Gauss’ bell curve teaches us that both extremities of a large population are small minorities. The vast majority of users is thus somewhere in between these two extreme positions. Most people are neither hardcore fanatics nor ADD-crippled casual specialists. As in, most people don’t play either per five minutes sessions or per 12 hours sessions. Most people are moderate, and their sessions times vary based on their real life occupations. Cause most people have a life. That’s even true for most hardcore gamers in fact. It’s only a small tiny fringe of the gaming community who spends their entire time in virtual worlds because they don’t fit in society. It’s a niche within the niche. The industry shouldn’t shape itself around their deranged minds. After all, they’re the ones who have not gone out enough to understand all what the world has to offer.
Being hardcore does not mean you only like violent games. That’s being macho-headed or blood-thirsty. It also does not mean you only like the best looking games. That’s being a graphic whore. It doesn’t mean you prefer rough realistic rendering over cute cartoon style, or vice versa. That’s a matter of personal tastes. The fact you don’t care that graphics are not as good on Wii as on same generation counterparts doesn’t make you casual, or a girl, or gay, or elder, or childish. It just means your focus is on innovative gameplay experiences.
I consider myself an elitist gamer for over twenty years and I have both the Wii and the 360 at home. I’ve found games that are new enough to justify these hardware purchases on both counts. On the 360, the additional raw power allowed innovative things through AI or physics improvements. On the Wii, it’s the control style in titles like Mario Galaxy or Smash Bros or even Trauma Center that have opened new possibilities that still surprise a 30 years old veteran like myself. A good game is not judged by its looks. Otherwise, I’d just watch a Dreamworks or Pixar animated film on DVD, pressing a button every now and then to change the subtitles. A game marks you depending on how fun it is to play it. When I was growing up, a hardcore gamer was usually priding himself that great graphics would not blind him from a flawed gameplay – because it’s the latter that kills the fun. Back then, a hardcore gamer would always prefer a Prince of Persia remake by NCS on the Super Famicom rather than a Nosferatu with better graphics but no substance
The grown-up game lover with lots of money and little time
Among all these extra categories that you find between both extremities of the spectrum, I’d bet my right arm that the most profitable to target is actually the veteran gamer. That guy who became a gamer with the NES or the Commodore 64, turned hardcore during the 16-bits era, went 3D on both the N64 and PlayStation, then owned about everything nextgen (from Dreamcast to Xbox, including PS2 and GameCube). Now in his thirties, he has a family, a home, a fulfilling but time-consuming job (maybe within the industry), bills to pay, lots of hobbies and passions to keep up with. As much as he loves games, he doesn’t have the energy any more to play a game by the 8-hour session. But thanks to a regular income, he has tons of money to throw at the hobby. He wants his game fix quick. He wants AAA quality titles that get to the point. That you can enjoy during one immersive night every now and then… but also by the minute if a minute is all the free time you have today. He no longer wants to learn long buttons combo to acquire a new game like he used to in the past. He doesn’t have the time for a long backstory intro he can’t skip before moving on to the actual fun. He wants instant entertainment.
Yet, he is probably still reading Edge, something he has been doing since 1993, when some of you were about to be born, and he is still ready to spend like a hardcore gamer, except this generation around he won’t have to engage in shady businesses at school to be able to do so. He owns a platinum credit card with his name printed on it. He may not have the time to thoroughly finish all the games he purchases… but he has the money to buy more of them. He heartily welcomes the Mario Karts, Guitar Heroes and WiiSports that he can pop out every time there are friends over for dinner. Bring on Super Mario Galaxy, Smash Bros, GTA IV, Gran Turismo, Pro Evolution Soccer, NBA 2K9, New Super Mario DS, Gears of War, Street Fighter IV, Top Spin, Trauma Center, Power Stone, Ikaruga, Need for Speed, Fight Night, Bomberman Wiimote or anything that he can enjoy casually when he only got five minutes, multiplayerly when he has visitors, or hardcorely when the wife went on girls night out and the kids are asleep. In my opinion, the greatest games are games accessible from various angles, even by the same person. Games in which the user decides what his level of immersion will be.
Note that it takes a lot more than “better graphics” to attract the veteran gamer. It’s been 25 years he’s been hearing the “better graphics” argument. When he listened to Ken Kutaragi over-hype the whole thing to its climax on E3 stage by claiming “the PlayStation 3 would be like 4D”, the veteran gamer didn’t get over-excited. Since he is no longer a kid, he is educated a bit and such tricks won’t work on him: the forth dimension is Time, a little concept that the Arab empire came up with to facilitate appointments some millennium ago. So are you selling me on the fact there is a clock in the PlayStation 3? Nice try, I’m not fifteen anymore. I may seem like digressing but my point is the industry is making a capital mistake if they keep thinking they are selling to kids (like in the eighties) or to teenagers (like in the nineties). According to the most recent surveys, the average gamer is aged between 25 and 33 depending on the country being studied. While your spectrum has expanded dramatically, your go-to-customer has grown up too. It’s only natural for the medium to mature along.
Mainstream acceptance
How the industrial can continue cater to the self-proclaimed hardcore gamers while developing his greed for mass-market appeal is the key question but frankly it’s always been. On any console. In fact, for any media. Let’s face it, a phenomenal success is achieved when both critical acclaim and massive sales are obtained. It’s true for a TV show like Seinfeld or The Sopranos as much as for a blockbuster movie like The Lord of the Rings. Or a game like Gears of War, Grand Theft Auto III, Super Mario World, Smash Bros Brawl, Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare or Gran Turismo (one of the most mainstream title on earth if you target the male audience; the big fast cars simulator is for guys what Nintendogs is for girls). Mass-market success, having something for both ends of the spectrum is a tough business indeed. It’s the crystallization of the thin line between commercial thinking and artistic creation.
The word “casual” is not a magic phrase that will deliver instant success. Quite the opposite, I believe it may be oversimplifying your analysis of the market so much that it eventually blindsides you. When truly phenomenal, a game transcends the entire spectrum - the core and the casual, the gemu otaku and the newbie – and eventually expands it further. If you think copying the latest phenomenal recipe will get you a tenth of the original success, you are dead wrong. You’ll have to come up with your own brilliant idea instead. Sorry if it sounds tough, that is the norm for any creative market.
Yeah you're pretty much spot on in this article. "AAA titles that get to the point."
For me, it's not about having a bazillion options and features and focusing on sweat beads and lighting. It's about giving me a polished fun 'core' experience. More of an "arcade game" design philosophy.
I am this old gamer with kids who wants a quick fix (recently found a great fix in Penny Arcade Adventures - just a hint for like-minded) but I must say there is not a lot of us.
Most of my friends who played games with me when I was 10, 15 or 18 are now non-gamers when you count spending. They play the games on their mobile to kill time but only the ones that came with the set. Yes, they play SingStar and Guitar Hero and Wii Sports when they come to my house but at home they don't. And maybe they will play something on PC if I give them the game for birthday or lend it to them, but will not buy it themselves. I'd say that maybe 10% of people who were into gaming with 18 are "paying gamers" with 28.
So, quick-fixers might be a category, but "new gamers" is a much larger one.
" except this generation around he won’t have to engage in shady businesses at school to be able to do so. "
A lovely observation. Over on the edge forums we were recently saying if it weren't for shady school yard business and some with teachers, most of us wouldn't have in some cases, £3000 a year hobbies at this point in our lives.
I miss Lik Sang, I'm still gutted but I guess that's progress.