Poll: Death of core games?

[Nerazzurri]

I was wondering, with social games taking off, and players ranging from housewives, to MMO players, cutting across age groups, is "Target Audience" relevant anymore?
Or when pitching a game, we just have to say "Everyone". Dont get me wrong - there are still a few of us left who don't play social games, and stick to classic multiplayer games (Starcraft, COD, HoN, etc), but the market is growing so quick so fast, and with diverse audience - with many platforms, is it the death of classic core games?
Will there be a time, dreaded by all gamers, that big publishers looking at the profit they can make with social games, switch their main focus on those and stop making good ol' games for the consoles?

 

[Mr. Google]

Core games will never ever die more social games will come but there will always be games for the Hardcore

 

[Blemontea]

Well even though the Market could lean to the social games, we still have many devolopers and publishers that will gladly make hardcore games to please all consumer taste. Besides we still have the Independent Market on the XBLA and PSN and they make tones of good stuff.

 

[titaniumChampion]

"Social gaming experience" are the new buzz words thrown around for a lot of new titles. In order to be relevant with the hipsters of today, each game needs to exploit their privacy for ad revenue and shallow friend networks.

I know that the core/hardcore audience will always be around, but I think the industry is shifting. I voted to say that the social games are already upon us. If not today, then the blueprints to get us there have already been drawn and it's only a matter of time. Motion controls are a clear indication that the companies are following the money, by investing in the casual audience.

 

[tharglet]

There will always be a market for "core" games imo.
There's a lot of "niche" genres in gaming already, and they still exist.
Some developers will switch - but I don't think that it'll be a permanent state of affairs.

 

[blankedboy]

They'll expand alot, but never take over.

 

[Hawk of Battle]

At this point I'm honestly starting to think we're heading towards another industry crash like in 83. The run up to that was filled with shoddy shovelware "Me too" games as well. Even the "core" games these days are all grey brown fps', or WoW cash-ins. With the imminent arrivals (and failures) of the Move and Kinect 2 of the major companies are going to lose all the money they invested in those products, which won't help either and while I can't cite any sources, I'm pretty sure most people are fed up with the Wii and all its gimicks by now too.

And then there's the next gimmick of 3d, which I don't see changing anything either. So yeah, a repeat of history is imminent, industry crash, everything dies, then a few years later we can start over with a fresh slate, and less shovelware.


That's the worse case scenario though.

 

[More Fun To Compute]

Even if social games are rising and console games look like they are in trouble I don't see how social games are damaging them more than anything else. Some core game industry figures have moved to social games but they were ones who had trouble fitting into the console market. I don't see Epic or Bungie moving to social games. That market must be even more risky and uncertain for these companies than knocking out action games for consoles.

 

[Cabisco]

No hardcore is doing just fine thanks, just think of all the games that have come out with year, coming out this year. Theirs billions of great 'core' titles.

Hell, just look at Modern Warfare 2. It's currently raked in over a $1 billion... The death of 'core' games indeed...

 

[SonicWaffle]

The run up to that was filled with shoddy shovelware "Me too" games as well. Even the "core" games these days are all grey brown fps', or WoW cash-ins.

Look, no offense, but I'm getting so damn sick of hearing this. Let's look at some recent big-budget 'core' games;

- Mass Effect 2 - incredibly well-written space opera with third-person combat. Shooter, but also Jedi-like or mechanical powers. Very pretty, and while not the most colourful, fitting because a lot of it takes place is spaceships. The planet sections are often vibrant.
- Assassin's Creed 2 - third-person game with equal parts stealth, swordfighting and free-running aspects. Colourful, great graphics, immersive representation of past cities.
- Dragon Age: Origins - sprawling classic-style RPG. Standard warrior/wizard/rogue classes with various sub-classes. Hundreds of skills, talents and spells. Game locations varying from dungeons to forests to crazy dream-worlds.
- Brutal Legend - insane. Funny, wacky, set in a world that looks like an 80's metal cover. Bright colours, shiny metal, imaginative if not brilliantly executed.
- Bayonetta - Devil May Cry-esque game about a witch pulling off weird and spectacular combos against demons. Also, nudity, which doesn't have much relevance to my point, but hey; nudity.
- Final Fantasy 13 - massive JRPG with plenty of magic, flashy attacks, probably a deeply in-depth story that I know nothing about because I had a fiddle on someone else's game and thought "screw this"
- God of War 3 - insane former god goes around hacking people up in various inventive ways. Locations vary from Olympian palaces to the bowels of Hell. Button-mashing third-person combat with QTE elements.
- Red Dead Redemption - classic Old West tale, plenty of dark humour and a great story. Absolutely jaw-droppingly beautiful game world, with third-person combat and a lot of nifty tweaks like horseback gunfights.

Have I made my point yet? It reallys annoys me when people insist that all modern AAA titles are just grey-brown FPS or that every new game released is shovelware for the casual audience. I ought to make a list of all the great games within, say, the last year that arent either of those things. That way I can just copy/paste it every time I hear the same old argument.

 

[Swny Nerdgasm]

Only thing that is killing "hardcore" games for me is seemingly every third person action game i play MUST HAVE QUICK TIME EVENTS!!!! Christ I'm getting tired of those...

 

[Delusibeta]

I'm more concerned about what if Kinect and Move would become a success, then all the shovelware makers can spend five extra minutes and get their games on all three formats, resulting in a tide of shovelware leading to market crash.

Honestly? AAA games are dying out, as development costs soar due to people having a graphics fetish. I think Nintendo was a generation too early in rearing up and leaving the graphical arms race[footnote]but then again, they would probably not have survived another beating[/footnote], because I think graphics have pretty much hit a plateau in the PC games market. Whether it's the result of developers putting more focus on the consoles which use pretty old tech by PC standards or a genuine technical plateau is unclear. Either way, the advent of digital distribution has resulted in an indie game boom, and I can see smaller teams making and publishing themselves being the future of gaming, although I can also see EA and Activision surviving.

 

[Arawn.Chernobog]

Social games will expand a lot, but Core games will not be killed because of it.

In fact some Core games will adapt to some GOOD features of Social Games (Yes, these do exist) and become "better" thus obtaining a larger market.


What Good features? Lack of excessively competitive attitude, you've all met this douche, the guy who will not only send you IMs containing poorly written sentences filled with homophobic commentary and how he "pwned" you, then proceeds to post a video on youtube of the same act (edited, of course) and who compulsively looks over tier lists and makes himself some spreadsheets before even TRYING the Online Multi-player mode, this is the guy who doesn't care how the game looks or feels, he just wants to win - This guy has no room in the more "social" scenario and having games take on more social features that would eliminate the room for these "individuals" would be lovely, imo.

 

[zatzie zombie num666]

i rekon what has happend is that games used to be something a gamer played but now its what pepol do for fun cos theay cant think of anything els to do so wher once a game compeny said what would we(asumeing theay are gamers themsevels)want to play theay would then go make some brilyent game etc etc etc but now theay say what would pepol like to play so theay start with them and make a great game then someone ses heay my dauter uses face book religously lets make it so that u can have a freinds list and other things that face book does and that makes the game worse and then someone els ses that they have a boy that has a freind that siad it would be cool if the game world was like a real world and you could do whatever so to free memoury space for the game the scrap a whole heap of good stuff so that theay can use said memoury for random crap like haveing the villigers all look difrent and move around alot and other realistic stuff and its killing games i rekon that whilest core games may never die theay will never get back to their former glorey and that means that their still gona be their but its gona be hard to find them and theay wont be nearly as fun as you want them to be (btw sorry for shit spelling and all that i cant write for shit)

 

[Booze Zombie]

Social gamers will simply move onto regular games, if they can figure the controls out.
Of course, that's the trade-off for a bit of depth in your medium, decreased pick up and play.

 

[OtakuNinja]

just because one style of game is released doesnt mean affects another

 

[Ken Sapp]

I was wondering, with social games taking off, and players ranging from housewives, to MMO players, cutting across age groups, is "Target Audience" relevant anymore?

Target Audience is always relevant, even when making social or casual games.

Or when pitching a game, we just have to say "Everyone". Dont get me wrong - there are still a few of us left who don't play social games, and stick to classic multiplayer games (Starcraft, COD, HoN, etc), but the market is growing so quick so fast, and with diverse audience - with many platforms, is it the death of classic core games?

No, though we may see more cross-platform games as publishers try to cover a wider swath of the market.

Will there be a time, dreaded by all gamers, that big publishers looking at the profit they can make with social games, switch their main focus on those and stop making good ol' games for the consoles?

Doubtful. As long as there is demand there will be someone to supply it and the demand is not exactly going down. If anything publishers may try to reduce the cost of AAA titles on the shelf(thus selling more copies, hopefully) by using profits from social/casual games to fund development of AAA games.

 

[Hawk of Battle]

The run up to that was filled with shoddy shovelware "Me too" games as well. Even the "core" games these days are all grey brown fps', or WoW cash-ins.

Look, no offense, but I'm getting so damn sick of hearing this. Let's look at some recent big-budget 'core' games;

- Mass Effect 2 - incredibly well-written space opera with third-person combat. Shooter, but also Jedi-like or mechanical powers. Very pretty, and while not the most colourful, fitting because a lot of it takes place is spaceships. The planet sections are often vibrant.
- Assassin's Creed 2 - third-person game with equal parts stealth, swordfighting and free-running aspects. Colourful, great graphics, immersive representation of past cities.
- Dragon Age: Origins - sprawling classic-style RPG. Standard warrior/wizard/rogue classes with various sub-classes. Hundreds of skills, talents and spells. Game locations varying from dungeons to forests to crazy dream-worlds.
- Brutal Legend - insane. Funny, wacky, set in a world that looks like an 80's metal cover. Bright colours, shiny metal, imaginative if not brilliantly executed.
- Bayonetta - Devil May Cry-esque game about a witch pulling off weird and spectacular combos against demons. Also, nudity, which doesn't have much relevance to my point, but hey; nudity.
- Final Fantasy 13 - massive JRPG with plenty of magic, flashy attacks, probably a deeply in-depth story that I know nothing about because I had a fiddle on someone else's game and thought "screw this"
- God of War 3 - insane former god goes around hacking people up in various inventive ways. Locations vary from Olympian palaces to the bowels of Hell. Button-mashing third-person combat with QTE elements.
- Red Dead Redemption - classic Old West tale, plenty of dark humour and a great story. Absolutely jaw-droppingly beautiful game world, with third-person combat and a lot of nifty tweaks like horseback gunfights.

Have I made my point yet? It reallys annoys me when people insist that all modern AAA titles are just grey-brown FPS or that every new game released is shovelware for the casual audience. I ought to make a list of all the great games within, say, the last year that arent either of those things. That way I can just copy/paste it every time I hear the same old argument.

Ok wow, first of all dude, chill the fuck out. Seriously. It's not like I was personally attacking you or your beliefs or anything so calm the fuck down dude. Jeez. Yes, I am aware there are lots of different games available, that goes without saying.

But for everyone one of those games up there, there's a MW2, followed by a BC2, followed by a Singularity, followed by about a dozen Halos, followed by a Medal of Honour, followed by a Wolfenstein.

And these are just the different IPs that do nothing differently, how about all the Mario games that get repackaged year in year out? How many Prince of Persias have there been in the last few years? How many Burnouts/NFS'/Blur/Split Seconds? (I know Blur and Split Second are both new IPS as well, but neither do anything spectacularly different, especially Blur, which is just Wipeout really).

And let's not even get into the billion and one Fitness/Sport/Brain Training shovelwares games.

Have I made MY point yet?

 

[SonicWaffle]

Ok wow, first of all dude, chill the fuck out. Seriously. It's not like I was personally attacking you or your beliefs or anything so calm the fuck down dude.

I'm perfectly calm. Where exactly did I act as if I was angry with you? You made a point, and I made a small list of games that disprove your point. I'm just absolutely sick to death of hearing the same flawed argument over and over and over until I want to bang my head into a wall. My beliefs don't come into this; what is important here is the fact that a lot of varied, colourful, excellent and most of all fun video games have come out over the last year or so.

But for everyone one of those games up there, there's a MW2, followed by a BC2, followed by a Singularity, followed by about a dozen Halos, followed by a Medal of Honour, followed by a Wolfenstein.

So what? For every Inception, there are a thousand Twilights. For every Toy Story 3, there are a thousand Princess & The Frog. I've lost count of how many shitty, formulaic romantic comedies come out every year, but I'm not announcing the death of cinema. This is how it is, and this is how it will always be, in any entertainment medium; the ratio of shit to gold is vastly in favour of the shit.

Yeah, right now there are a ton of faceless FPS games. There are also, as I pointed out in my last post, a lot of truly excellent games that are nothing like those FPS games. Why the hell is this a bad thing?! If I don't want to play a game, I don't buy the damn thing - I wait for something I do want to buy instead of whining that the game I don't want has ruined gaming for me.

And these are just the different IPs that do nothing differently, how about all the Mario games that get repackaged year in year out?

This is another flawed argument that really gets on my tits. So Mario is just the same game, constantly being repackaged and sold to the gullible as a new experience? Sure. This is why Super Mario Galaxy is a side-scrolling 2D game that mostly concerns itself with little more than jumping, right? It isn't as if we've had games where Mario went to space (Galaxy), Mario RPGs (Paper Mario), Mario fighting games (Super Smash Bros), Mario racing games (Mario Kart), Mario minigame collections (Mario Party), Mario sports games (Tennis, soccer, golf, etc). Hell, even the regular mainstream Mario installments (64, Sunshine, Galaxy etc) are all different in terms of gameplay mechanics. To claim that they are all the same game is just ignorant. It's like saying the every Zelda game is the same, ignoring the gameplay/story/character changes; it's an assumption based on nothing more than the title.

Have I made MY point yet?

Not in the slightest. Your point was, if I recall correctly, that all the new 'core' games are "gray-brown FPS games or WoW rip-offs". This is, with all due respect, a load of bollocks. It's something people say so they can sound bitter and jaded, and that's what gets to me: gaming is meant to be fun. If you're not having fun, if you truly think every game is the same and that everything is gray-brown, then stop playing video games. In that scenario, you've clearly stopped enjoying them.