Nintendo Wii and Casual Games: Destroyer of Worlds?
Is the Nintendo Wii a good thing?
We all know it’s selling well, and we all know everyone loves it. The thing is, it’s beckoning to the ‘casual’ market. No one disagrees on this. There have been many discussions of whether or not casual games will phase out ‘hardcore’ games from the market. Analysts and members of the enthusiast press have shot down such claims, because they believe there will always be a hardcore market, as the hardcore are the ones who support the industry, are the ones who buy many games a year, as opposed to the casual who buy a Wii and Wii Play, then stop.
The Present
People still question the hardcore market, though. Take a look at the top ten selling games every month. Sure, there’s a few heavy hitters targeted at the hardcore, ie. Call of Duty 4 and Grand Theft auto VI, but it, without fail, always includes Wii Play and other casual games. Coupled with the Wii’s consistent first place finish on the domestic and international hardware sales charts every single month, one comes to the conclusion: the Wii is not the gimmick journalists initially thought it was going to be, and it is here to stay.
Presently, it does not seem to affect core games at all. They come out at the same pace they always have, and with higher quality than ever. One thing thats come into question, though, is PC gaming, arguably the most hardcore of them all. PC, where the shooter, RTS and adventure game was born, is seeing its genres slowly leave its warm embrace to the arms of a growing threat: consoles. What does this have to do with the Wii though? Virtually nothing, but it has much to do with the casual market. There’s the fact that the less and less games are exclusive on PC, the more and more small and casual downloadable games appear. This is primarily caused by PC piracy driving developers away, but also with the success of Steam, small, bite-sized games are easier to access than ever before. Many people see this as the PC’s strong point these days; creative and small games that cannot appear or will not be as good on any other platform (Audiosurf) are definitely getting popular. The similar setup over at Xbox Live Arcade and the PS Store are also getting popular, but the simple truth is that they are are nowhere near as mass market as retail games are.
But, like everything, things start out small. It’ll only be a matter of time before they outsell the big games, and its because of money.
The Future
Ah, the future. Something mankind has envisioned since the beginning of humanity. The future is strange; it holds truths and wonders we could never imagine, yet it is strangely predictable.
The Wii’s casual theme is here to stay. Casual sells systems, and soon, it will sell more games than the competitors. Money is the reason. Today, Xbox 360, PS3 and high-end PC games are costing millions and millions of dollars to make, not to mention manpower in the hundreds. Case and point: GTA4 with its rumored budget of 100 million dollars. That is unprecedented, and cost more to make than most films. As we head into the future, no doubt will the price of big games grow, both for the consumer and the developer. They pass the savings on to you! Another sign of this is that many developers have opted not to have platform exclusive titles because, financially speaking, there is no benefit.
As the money needed to make a game grows, more and more developers are going to be tempted to dip their feet into the pool that is downloadable games. A good example would be David Jaffe of God of War fame; he came off of making blockbusters to form a studio dedicated to making small games, Eat Sleep Play. This trend is already showing signs of becoming huge. Take a look at the Xbox Live Arcade and the PS Store, for instance. The stores are full of games from big name publishers looking to get a slice of the profit. While there are independent developers who are making games in small teams or sometimes by themself (Everyday Shooter, which has won many awards), the market is saturated with large publishers. While the PC market is showing more signs of indie development thanks to its open nature, these trends don’t seem to be making their way to consoles.
With big publishers finding the downloadable space more and more attractive, they’ll reroute their resources to the smaller, more profitable games instead of the giant, expensive titles that cast doubt on whether or not they’ll make the company any money at all. Corporations cannot have doubt, especially these days, as the smaller studios are quickly being eaten up by monopolizing publishers such as Activision-Blizzard and Electronic Arts. Many companies are being forced to merge in order to stave off company buy-outs.
Unless the outbreak in popularity of casual games sparks interest in hardcore games, things look grim for the future of hardcore games. In the future, 20 or so years from now, the majority of video game sales will be of the casual variety. Video game sales will depend on the mass market appeal, and hardcore games will be few and far between. When a hardcore game, a game for the gamers, if you will, does come out, it will be funded directly by the sales figures of its casual counter-parts.
Assuming the casual trend lives on, the future IS casual.
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