Industry Lunacy

[WarpRattler]

whatever is on iPods these days

Off the top of my head, I can think of Peggle, Bomberman, and Sonic the Hedgehog. Are you implying that Bomberman is intended for "casual" gamers?

[Chupperson Weird]

What I mean is that... well... take movies, for example; most people have busy lives these days, but do the studios make forty-minute movies about a boy and his dog? Do record labels do one-minute showtunes? When you dumb-down games to make them more accesible to the average joe, they lose what makes them videogames.

For your much-needed information, the length of CDs by most artists has been steadily decreasing (while at the same time the price has been going up) as well as the fact that songs are designed to be disposable and sound horrible on anything better quality than iPod earbuds. So yes. The degradation of music is pretty intense at this moment. However, this is a bad thing, unlike the situation with video games, which is turning a sometimes-intimidating industry into something friendly to even more people in the world. And I'm going to play Wii Bowling with my grandma and enjoy it and there's nothing you can think to stop me.

I mean, here's a point I've been trying to get off my chest for some time: "Casual gamers" already have their systems of choice, and that's the "Games" section on Windows, cellphone solitaire, and whatever is on iPods these days. The point is, most of those Bejeweled and Brick Breaker and Pac-Man-type games didn't bother me until they started showing up on consoles in lieu of AAA titles. Do you consider Wordjong a videogame in the same way that you might consider Super Mario 64 a videogame? Didn't think so.

Again, you have no idea what you're actually talking about. Do you realize how many casual gamers bought a PS1 and a PS2? That's the reason for Sony's immense success the past two generations. I sell video games to people at my job. You have no idea how many people just want a PS2 and some cheap Madden game or Guitar Hero. That is the definition of casual gaming.

I guess what I'm really saying here is that so-called casual gamers just play what's already on the multi-purpose gadgets they already own--no one mildly interested in videogames (which the aforementioned "casual" titles only are in the literal sense) is going to pay $250 for a machine that solely plays games. In fact, the motion control has actually scared off a few of my relatives--seems complicated from the outside looking in, right? Heck, my mom's hooked on this touch-screen electronic sudoku handheld she got for Christmas, but I doubt she'd touch it if I got her a DS with the same thing in "game" form! Wasting genuine gamers' time with flash-in-the-pan quickie games on the Wii/DS is an insult to the intelligence of casuals and gamers alike.

I'm having a really hard time conveying exactly what I mean here, so bear with me.

You must be. Pretty much all non-gamers I know of think the Wii and DS are great bridges to something they didn't understand before. The general reaction is much closer to "wow, all you have to do is move and there aren't a bunch of buttons to remember!" Which means it actually looks much less complicated.

[Glorb]

The problem isn't with casual gamers themselves, it's with companies spending more effort on casual games than on serious ones. Right now it's hip and mainstream to play ObbleUzzleJong on your cell phone, so more people are buying them, so more companies are making them. The only company I've seen this happen to is Nintendo, who now seems to put out one triple-A title a year for every seven hundred quirky casual minigame collections with a retro-chic aesthetic. I love the idea of old folks and non-gamers playing games, but if that means forgetting to make full-length games, then there's a problem. So far, that hasn't really happened, but we're dangerously close.

[ShadowBrain]

Off the top of my head, I can think of Peggle, Bomberman, and Sonic the Hedgehog. Are you implying that Bomberman is intended for "casual" gamers?

What I mean is that casual gamers (a term which seems to have a definition in roughly the same way that "love" or "the meaning of life" have definitions), in most cases, would prefer to play games already on the things they own. Heck, I'm sure if you could squeeze Link to the Past on someone's Razr they'd play it in-between calls whether they're 15 or 55.

[Chupperson Weird]

Miyamoto doesn't like full-length games. People in Japan don't have time to play full-length games, and a lot of people over high-school age in America don't either. I'm not saying there shouldn't be long games, but that isn't really where the market is at right now. It's more of an arcade-style mentality, where you have short or unbeatable games you keep going back to. I guess that might happen when more people are playing them.

P.S. what is a full-length game anyway? Portal seemed just the right length at about 6 hours. Xenogears seems just right at 40+ hours. You know?

[DeadAwake]

Chup hit the nail on the head.  As part of the post-high-school population, not only do I agree with his analysis--but I enjoy the practical outcome:  games that are satisfying even if you don't have hours to dedicate.  Why someone who does have hours to dedicate to games would be incapable of similarly enjoying such creations is beyond me.  Maybe there's a ratio of free time vs. game time that produces optimal satisfaction.

Oh, but I'd amend "over high school" to "over high school non-pot-smokers."

[Glorb]

To me, "full-length" means "just as long as the main story needs to be, with no missing plot holes, and also with a couple extra side missions". A good example is RE4, even if the El Gigante fight was overused. You could enjoy the game without spending time in the target range, the Ada scenarios, or The Mercenaries, and still have tons of fun. I don't want to be told what to like; just because hip twentysomethings don't like 40+ hour games doesn't mean I don't. In fact, once I'm a hip twnetysomething, I'll still like long games; it'll just take me even longer to beat it.

[AbercrombieBaseball]

I'm one of these casual gamers, although I tend to play more in the winter because the weather around here is horribly cold.

I'm also one of those "hip 20-somethings" you mention--I'm 21. What I usually will do is get sports games almost exclusively but I also like Mario games. I will play a little bit at a time to make it last me until the next one comes out. For example, I got Mario Galaxy at Christmas and so far have something like eight stars, but I've only had two long sessions with it. With all my old high school buddies back at college now, I won't be out every night anymore so I'll be able to play maybe one or two times each week if I don't have much coursework and am not going anywhere with my college friends. I have time to play them because I don't go to bars or anything if my other friends do. No way I get myself in that mess, so I spend it with Mario instead.

Games like Madden, though, are marketed right up the alley for a guy like me. I love sports and when there isn't a game on and I'm not playing a game of something (usually baseball, sometimes fall intramural basketball or swimming, maybe soccer) I'm playing them electronically. The Wii has been a godsend for me--I can golf any time I want now and actually use real motion to do it! (It's nothing like the real deal but it's closer than Mario Golf on the Nintendo 64 was...and I always thought that was a pretty good golf game).

I've actually liked this new trend in marketing. It used to be they would market only to those guys who played shoot-em-up games where you killed draggons and blew up cars and stuff. Now they actually market the games for people who normally wouldn't be playing video games but want to add them to their party or something (like me), especially the ones based on sports (like the Wii Sports game that comes with the system).

[Glorb]

Well, this whole thing reminds me of the Mountain Dew era of marketing (2001-2006, according to my data). Basically, this was where all games were marketed to buff, 25-year-old, Mountain Dew-guzzling, Doritoes-gorging, Xtreme sports-playing jocks who primarily played games with carjacking and peoplesmashing. Problem was, few people who play games are like that, no matter how much Spike TV said otherwise. I always found it puzzling, because the games themselves were still the same. But now the demographic shift has also caused a shift in the types of games out now, and this deeply concerns me.

[AbercrombieBaseball]

Another classic marketing technique with the Mountain Dew. The intended audience may have thought those guys were "cool". Sort of like how they always use 8 year olds in ads for toys targeted to 5 year olds.

[Chupperson Weird]

just because hip twentysomethings don't like 40+ hour games doesn't mean I don't.

Nice job completely evading my point. I love RPGs and long games. And, due to the amount of time and the amount of games I own, I also like satisfyingly short games. Part of why people like video games is that they help fulfill your basic need for a feeling of progress. But if you aren't able to stick with a game for months, that gets sort of lost.

[Lizard Dude]

Maybe Nintendo likes making brain trainers on DS because the target audience actually buys them instead of downloading them to a flash card and playing them weeks before US release.

:o

[BP]

Yeah! And people outside the target audience enjoy Brain Age, too!

Brain Age 2 is 10 MB more than the original, after both are trimmed. :O