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Waiting On The Great Migration
From Nintendo to iPhones, everyone is talking about casual gaming. That's an umbrella term, of course, referencing everything from the size of the game to the skill level necessary to play it. Regardless of the title we're talking about, many people are banking on the power of casual gaming, how it can make a gamer out of anyone. Yes, but then what happens?
Some in the industry have talked about casual gaming like a gateway drug: They imagine that a non-gamer or occasional gamer would play a casual title and then they'd graduate to more mainstream titles as their eyes are opened up to the world of gaming. If this theory is correct, I imagine we'd start to see some stats bare this out.
For instance, Nintendo's massive installed base for the Wii should offer a massive bedrock of potential hardcore gamers as a great number of casual Wii owners supposedly transition to more mainstream and hardcore fare. But I don't think we've seen that at all. Not only if you go by the low sales numbers of Wii M-rated titles like MadWorld (especially considering how small of a percentage those sales are in comparison with the huge installed base) or of multi-system games, but if you look at game sales in general. Number have been increasing when compared with those same months in previous years, but nothing to suggest that the floodgates from Casualand and The Hardcore Hills have been thrown wide. Numbers can be misleading, of course, so if there has been a huge transition, maybe it's being absorbed in multi-platform software and hardware sales.
Whether casual gamers move over to hardcore games or not - who cares? I'm not a huge evangelist, so I think we should be content that people are playing games no matter what kind they are.
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