Keep Gaming For Gamers

[Dr Spaceman]

It seems to me that console game makers are starting to realize that mainstream gamers really do want complexity and innovation in their games. The above poster mentioned MGS4, never played one myself but I know the series to be quite complex (and very popular!). Also, the GTA games are very complex with a lot of stuff for the hardcore to dig their teeth into.

What I'm really excited about is Fallout 3. It looks like it could bring some of the "hardcore" elements that games like Deus Ex had, and then lost when the sequel was made primarily for consoles. With this new wider market, the games we loved are now becoming much more well presented with hopefully a deeper range of features due to the increased amount of funding available. While by no means does money a good game make, it can make it easier to digest.

Lastly, I know that as a person who does not play video games for a living, I only have time to play through one game every month or so, and as a result I do my homework to make sure my gaming time (much more important now than my gaming dollar) is expressly spent only on games of substance.

 

[crazy-j]

we should keep gaming as the last bastion of 'intelligent' media.

sorry i cant take that seriouly when i think of the people on Xbox Live xD

but i do no what u mean, and yes the wii, well nintendo as a whole, is stupid, all these crappy Wii and DS 'games' coming out.

unfortunatly this will never happen, as all games companies want as much money as possible, meaning as much sales as possible, meaning makin it mainstream.

shame really, gaming used to be good...

lol i have had enough of mario and nintendo..they sould really just stop i think

 

[bittman]

Article looks worth a long read, I'll get to it when I'm not at work...

Just going to say that there is no such thing as games not dictated towards the "mainstream". If your game aims to appeal to hardcore gamers only, you aren't making a profit. Games are, funnily enough, already lost to the crowd of unintelligent masses. I mean, if they weren't I wouldn't be here chatting about it with you; I hate intelligent-people-only crap.

Next you'll be saying only people who know how to use top-tier characters of a fighting game are worthy of playing in tourneys.

 

[minoes]

In my opinion the real problem are the "Hardcore" gamers. Video games don´t get dumbed down because of "Casual" gamers, that is entirely fault of the people who want more violence, blood, sex and F-bombs. Most of us who grow up playing video games don´t care for those type of things, neither do the casual gamers, but the hardcore, they don´t even care if a game is a bug ridden piece of crap, as long as it has pretty graphics and lots of blood.

 

[wordsmith]

To be fair, there are a couple of points (already been made but hell, why not make 'em again?)
1) Whilst I do agree with you about the number of casual gamers flooding the system, Surely they are the same as you were when YOU first picked up a controller/keyboard? Admittedly most of us have been gaming longer than we care to remember, but that's not to say these guys couldn't be the champs in 10 years. We (as a commumnity) owe it to the casual gamers to accept them, slowly integrating them into more and more hardcore games until they MWHAHAHAHAH!!!

... sorry, got carried away there... My other complaint is
2) the amount of people (read: women/girls) who carry DS's around with them. Now OK, DS's are hardly a hardcore system, but I own and play one frequently. I get annoyed when these girls think themselves gamers because they play Cooking Mama (What the hell? You wanna cook? cook! you get food afterwards if you do it in real life!) Brain training and those shoddy fitness pack thingys. GET SOME REAL GAMES!!!*



*like pokemon, LoZ or mariokart

 

[bittman]

... sorry, got carried away there... My other complaint is
2) the amount of people (read: women/girls) who carry DS's around with them.

I'll stop you there because beyond this you did not mention the chances of picking up this type of woman/girl.

Also, don't bag Brain Training when it's making more money than you'll ever see while the last mariokart hasn't exactly been breaking records (and I would put below Cooking Mama).

 

[RYjet911]

I feel the problem here isn't the developers not making enough games to cater to the 'hardcore' gamer (Which is a phrase I hate)

Has anyone forgotten bad games have always existed? You've only got to watch a couple of episodes of AVGN to realise not every game back in the early to mid 80s was automatically good. Plus, there was a lot more games back then, so more good games came out to disguise the bad games in their libraries.

There's also the problem of money. Back then, especially for the Atari and games of that era, ANYONE could make a game for the Atari for dirt cheap. These days, budgets can be as much, if not higher than films, and catering to the wider demographic is the only option for the game designer as they don't want to make losses (Which would be MASSIVE since the 'hardcore' part of gaming is very small).

There's also the issue of what 'hardcore' gamers see as a good game. To me, it seems like a game has to be either System Shock 2 or Counter Strike. I remember an arguement a while ago about TF2 being too lazy, and if only it was more like CS:S it might have been made better. It's something I hate to see, and it appears as though hardcore gamers only want to see remakes of older good games to come out, while anything that does differently is bad.

These days, it's easier to point out a good or bad game, since there's a large amount of things to criticize. Back in the early era of gaming, you could only really talk about gameplay and graphics, and graphics would simply be how well you can distinguish between the different blobs. Now, you can talk about character model graphics, world graphics, game physics, enemy and friendly AI, active and immersive sound, gameplay (and whatever game, good or bad, it rips off), controls, multiplayer...

The reason (Or at least one of the reasons) for a significant jump in recent years is games are becoming either too ambitious and flopping in the end (Fable, Mass Effect and Spore for a few examples) or because a game is so expensive to make to match expectations about graphics and sound these days that catering to the widest audience possible is the only way to make money.

My final point is that it's the hardcore gamer's fault. They have this closed little circle that's like 4Chan. You have to secretly become part of the group before you make yourself known, otherwise it's difficult to get in. Hardcore gamers shun casual gamers constantly for games which cater to the casual gamer. If hardcore gamers want more games catered to them, maybe they should let more casual gamers into their little elitest world.

Of course, if they did that, it wouldn't be an elitest world they live in any longer, and probably end the only reason hardcore gamers want to be who they are: Someone who can ***** about the majority.

 

[Ultrajoe]

Once Again I Must Rear My Head To Comment.

Keep Gaming For The Gamers? Was It Ever Really Ours?

Are We Its Possessors Or Merely Misguided Fools Who Squandered Our Golden Age And Now Weep As Things Return To The Norm?

We Are Fools, Things Are Not Getting Worse, They Are Going Back To Normal. The Important Thing To Do Now Is Not To Fight The Tide And Doom Our Media By Making 'Hardcore' Games A Nuisance Through Our Complaining.

Embrace The 'Decline' And Have Faith It Will Rise Again.

And Now I Go Away Again, These Caps Are A ***** To Type Just To Stay In Character.

 

[Cyclomega]

You were very close to falling in the cruise control for cool mode...

Not mentioning that if hardcore means Devil May Cry, Gears of War, Resistance and Halo, maybe there was something wrong to begin with...

 

[Credge]

I'm just gonna put this out there - games sucked before the casual market grew.

Irrelevant. Subject matter for discussions like this should not be based on the suckitude or quality of the games, but the quantity and market.

Saturating a market with games of a certain genre (any really, mini-game compilations, casual games, WW2 shooters, futuristic RTS, etc) is never a good thing. Saturating a market with products geared towards people that buy a hand full of games and never buy any more is even worse. The situation is worsened when the casual games offer absolutely nothing of substance that non-casual games offer. The only games that actually do a decent job at getting players in to the differing genres would be Spore and things like Pixeljunk Monsters.

That should be the goal of casual game developers, however, it is not. Even further, flooding the market with same-game-different-package casual games is going to scare off a large number of the casual gamers that these developers are trying to bring in.

The developers need to rethink their position on casual games and gamers and gather their collective thoughts in to doing something productive with this crowd. But, at the freaking least...

ENOUGH WITH THE PETZ! LINE OF GAMES.

 

[Cyclomega]

Wow, I just remembered when the very first Dogz! came around in 1995, my sister and I played the demo I got in a magazine's CD, and (mind you she was 6 or 7) she was all over it, she wanted Dogz!, Catz! you name it. She got it on her GBC in 2000.
At the time it was still a small thing, but it's funny how the behavior of the dogs was so well rendered, the cats vere ugly though...

 

[WTEricson]

I strongly disagree with the OP's veiw. I dislike the Wii because of my tastes, but the Wii is introducing children to games... and believe it or not a fair amount of them could grow-up, make great games, and help the artistic side of the industy. The Wii also reminds adults that games can be fun who might otherwise never of touched a videogame again, it will be up to their tastes wether they end up helping the industy or hurting it by being caffine soaking ADHD Halo players, or if they will make and/or buy games that show games are a wonderfull medium for delivering an artistic experience.

If everyone subscribed to you logic there would only be one consumer, an industry cannot thrive or even survive off one consumer. The more the marrier. We just have to hope that people become more intelligent and buy great games instead of the mindless 7 hour fart jokes we see in Gears2 and GTA4 until they are 40 year old tech freaks (no offence).

 

[poleboy]

The problem with the Wii is it does have a lot of potential that has yet to be realised.
'Serious' gamers are put off by the 'Shitty third party' stuff and developers are still getting to grips with the PS3 while comfortable with the 360. The Wii seems to be losing out as an afterthought and anything decent that does get released will continue to be passed over and the Wii die off never acheiving all it could.

Read this. The Wii is doing exactly what it was meant to do. Also, it's common knowledge that the Wii has sold better than any other console this generation. Look it up anywhere (well, anywhere but Sony and MS sites).

 

[Zombie_King]

we should keep gaming as the last bastion of 'intelligent' media.

sorry i cant take that seriouly when i think of the people on Xbox Live xD

Ditto. Some gamers are definitely intelligent, but that, by far doesn't mean all of them are. Besides, the goal of the games business is ultimately to make money. If lots of people like to match up brightly colored shapes while we 'nade spam and light the other team on fire, why can't they? I say we can peacefully coexist. That is, until some casual gamer discovers Halo...

 

[RYjet911]

I'd also like to point out that gaming has hardly ever been an 'intelligent' piece of media compared with EVERY OTHER FORM OF MEDIA IN EXISTENCE.

You've got newspapers, Internet, books, films, television, just to touch the surface of what the media is.

 

[Good morning blues]

I could not disagree with the OP more. Gaming isn't a departure from the mainstream - it's more profitable than Hollywood, for god's sake. Additionally, claiming that Army of Two, Too Human and Ninja Gaiden are "intelligent entertainment" is completely absurd.

I welcome the new, casual gamers, because hardcore gamers just want the same thing over and over, and frankly I'm sick of it. It's time for diversity and a broader appeal. I've been running down tight corridors shooting small skittery aliens ever since Halo, and I've had it. Give me something that will make me think and keep me guessing for once.

 

[Perwer]

I'm getting sick of all this "hate-the-mainstream"-bullshit.
EDIT: the term "mainstream" is (not only but mostly) a marketing trick. Just like "emo" and the surrounding culture of being "alternative".