The casual-core consumer industry

Mike Sholars
Features and Opinions Editor
Solitaire is the most popular game in video game history, even though we don’t really think of it as being a video game any more.
It has been bundled with every Microsoft operating system since the release of Windows 3.0 in 1990, and I sincerely doubt anyone reading this article has not played it.
Is everyone who has played Solitaire a so-called gamer? If that’s not the case, then at what point is one officially a gamer? Do Facebook games such as Mafia Wars and FarmVille count toward this gamer pedigree? All of these questions are being posed in poorly worded message boards across the internet. The topic often changes, as does the level of punctuation and proper grammar, but the question is always the same: What will become of the hardcore gamer? Furthermore, why should any of us care?
The very term “hardcore gamer” has multiple definitions of varying proportions of reverence and scorn. Some gamers aspire to be hardcore, seeing themselves as true fans of an art form. Nintendo of America corporate spokesperson Charlie Scibetta defined hardcore gamers in 2008: “They’re usually the early adopters that want to get the latest version of something, and they’ll be the ones that put it through its paces the hardest and give us all kinds of feedback and tell us what they like and don’t like.” So perhaps hardcore gamers are enthusiastic, passionate and loyal. They tend to be an evergreen demographic, and support certain companies or franchises with unshakable loyalty. With that loyalty, however, comes a sense of entitlement.
Gaming has evolved from a niche, nerdy hobby in the 1980s to a massive institution that consistently out-grosses the film and music industries.
For example, Call of Duty: Black Ops, the latest installment of the critically lauded and lucrative shooter franchise, made worldwide US $650 million in sales in its first five days of release. Its predecessor, Modern Warfare 2, has generated more revenue than last year’s hit film Avatar.
With this type of mainstream success, the video game industry has become a viable place to do business, and large corporations, from Vivendi-Universal to Disney, have begun to carve out their own piece of the pie.
To certain hardcore gamers this trend, which has essentially been happening over the last 10 to 15 years, is the equivalent of watching a favourite band transform from obscure indie talent to an arena-filling rock act governed by record executives. Many of them have become
bitter and resentful because their industry of choice is no longer targeting them exclusively anymore. It makes one wonder why a company with an army of loyal customers would ever try to market toward anyone else.
In 2005, W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne, co-directors of the Blue Ocean Strategy Group, released a book entitled Blue Ocean Strategy. While the actually strategies in the book are still questioned today, its influence and alleged effectiveness can be seen in companies as diverse as Cirque du Soleil and Nintendo. The book was the end result of studies the pair had been running since the 1990s, and the titular strategy can perhaps best be explained by the current divide between the aforementioned hardcore gamers and the newly emerging casual gamers.
When Nintendo released the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) worldwide in 1985, it revitalized an industry that had all but died since the Video Game Crash of 1983. With the resurrection of the home video game market, Nintendo began creating a pool, or “ocean,” of customers. As this pool grew and the industry was proven safe and profitable, and competitors started to appear, like Sega with the Master System in the late ’80s, and Sony with its Playstation in the mid-’90s.
Over time, multiple companies were fighting over an audience that was failing to grow exponentially; they were cutting a pie into fractions.
Hardcore gamers enjoyed the benefits of being courted by multiple corporations at once, but Nintendo fell from its position as industry leader. By the early 2000s, their latest system (the Nintendo Gamecube, with lifetime sales currently at 21.74 million) was being soundly destroyed by Sony’s console (the Playstation 2, with lifetime sales currently at 146.9 million). Kim and Mauborgne’s call the situation Nintendo found themselves in a “red ocean.” Multiple corporations (or sharks) fighting over the same demographic (or feeding section of ocean) leads to trivial gains, or eventual losses. The solution posed in the book is to find a new demographic to market to (or a new product to market) and succeed
in the waters of an untouched “blue ocean.”
It’s hard to say for sure if someone in Nintendo’s Japanese offices read any of the papers Blue Ocean Strategy Group put out, but their strategy with the Wii reads like a chapter from the book itself.
Instead of competing for hardcore gamers, they targeted an untapped resource: people who don’t consider themselves gamers at all, people who play Solitaire at work and Bejeweled on the way home on a hand-held system. Their next system, the Wii, boasted an intuitive motion-controlled interface, simple multiplayer-based games and an advertising campaign that showed grandparents playing the system with their laughing grandchildren.
Hardcore gamers that reacted negatively to the perceived simplicity
of the system quickly found themselves irrelevant; the Wii has sold 75.90 million units worldwide to date, and will probably clear 80 million by 2011.
“Casual gamers,” as this new group has been labeled, outnumber hardcore gamers several times over. Microsoft and Sony, Nintendo’s competitors, have realized this, and recently released their own devices (the Kinect and the Playstation Move, respectively) in order to move in on this newly discovered Blue Ocean. Hardcore gamers are not only in the minority, but they’re not even the chief draw. Call of Duty: Black Ops broke sales records, but sales of the game tapered off by 85 percent only three weeks later.
Hardcore gamers can be counted on to support certain “hardcore” franchises that won’t appeal as much to casual gamers, but the smart money is on the continued profitability of people who play their games on Facebook and on their smartphones.
We all saw the ads for The Social Network: Facebook has over 500 million users as of July 2010. Over 10 percent of all Facebook users play FarmVille. PopCap Games, creators of Bejeweled, Peggle and Plants vs Zombies, earned $2 billion in revenue in 2007; it’s estimated they earned significantly more this fiscal year.
The games, while diverse in content, all offer the same things: addictive yet simplistic gameplay, easy controls and a low-cost of entry (anywhere from $0 to $20). In addition, “freemium” games – like Facebook’s FarmVille and the newly-released Ravenwood Fair, co-designed by John Romero, creator of DOOM – are free to play, and charge users money for access to advanced items and cool gifts for their avatars. The people have spoken with their wallets, and investors have spoken with their support; courting the casual gamer is a lucrative business strategy, and it is here to stay; however, this does not mean the destruction of hardcore gaming as we know it.
Gamers that bemoan the ascension of casual-social gaming find themselves in the amusing position of being old-fashioned pundits in a new industry. Much like silent film directors who claimed that adding sound to motion pictures would ruin the industry, hardcore gamers are complaining that letting more people enjoy their hobby will inevitably destroy the whole art form.
The future of gaming is not a narrow path, but a wide continuum. Gamers now have the freedom to download titles directly to their system of choice, or buy a physical copy at the store. They can choose from AAA blockbuster titles, or artistic indie creations.
What the shift toward Blue Ocean represents is not an abandonment of the old, but a broadening of horizons. They can embrace the obvious positives that this amount of choice brings to the medium, or they can complain on message boards. I’ve already made my choice: I’ve had Solitaire open on my desktop for hours now.