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General 18 Diciembre, 2009
Tengo que avisar que la entrada la voy a hacer en el idioma de Shakespeare.
Hi!
I was reading your blogpost via google translate, so let me hope I understood what you were saying.
First of all, thanks for posting in my blog and reading it.
In the book, I argue that the “casual revolution” is real for a number of reasons:
- The video game audience has expanded a lot in the last few years.
- ”The industry” is now open towards making games that target a non-traditional audience.
- There are some very real design changes that we can identify.
It is true that the gaming population has expanded in the last years but from my point of view “The Industry” doesn´t like “casual games” and “casual gamers” because the values of “The Industry” are against the idea of the “casual games”. When I am talking about “The Industry” I am not talking about all the game developers and all the game editors, I am talking about the bigger ones and they are huge promoters of “casual” idea.
If you are a small or medium developer and make a game then it will be labeled as an “Indie Game”, “Casual Game” or any label made by “The Industry”, these labels are nothing more than a big cage for the small and medium developers who are trapped inside of it thinking that inside the videogame world we have different markets. In this case I like to use the restaurant analogy, when you want to eat something and you aren´t in your home then is clear that all the restaurants are competing against all them, they compete in the “job” or “task” of giving something to eat for the consumer. In the case of gaming we have the same situation, “casual games”, “indie games” and “hardcore games” are nothing more than labels for “games”, all them compete in the same job and all them are “hired” for the same purpose.
The idea of “casual” is ALSO a marketing term, but it still has very real consequences for how video games are made and who gets to play video games.
For me the “casual game industry” is nothing more than a fad, when the big publishers that are part of “The Industry” started to use the subject it was when they started to make an huge amount of shovelware, instead of competing between them for taking advantage of the new market they took a strategy where their products were below the average in quality and at the same time they flowed the market with an huge offer of games, at the end the bubble has started to break and now “The Industry” is saying that the “hardcore gaming” is more secure.
We know that the markets are like lands with their borders and values well defined, “The Industry” made the idea of a different market that is completely opposed to the “hardcore gaming industry”, I talked about it in my last post using this graph:
- Strategy 1 is the one followed by “The Industry” when we talk about hardcore gaming, they have taken a value that grows very fast as the main engine of the industry. In this case main value is graphics and visual power.
- Strategy 2 is the one followed by “The Casual Game Industry” the concept is stay with the consumers without making an evolution of the product. This is the reason why we are watching a lot of shovelware in for of “casual games”.
- Strategy 3 is the one that Nintendo is following with Wii and this is very strategy different than the second one.
When “The Industry” started to see the gaming expansion they decided to adopt the new market in a form where their main market (the hardcore one) didn’t become endangered and this is the reason why they took the second strategy and defined a type of market around their interests.
Nintendo is a very different beast in this case, they have made a Disruptive Technology, they are technologies that are a more accessible version of an existing product, the incumbents of the markets saw it as toy because it is crappy product for crappy customers at the beginning, but they aren´t in the lower part of the market forever, they evolve, but using different values than the incumbents. In the case of videogames, the incumbents are using graphics as the main value, in the case of Wii the main value is the user interface and in future iterations it will evolve.
“The Industry” behaviour in this case isn´t very different than the one that Polaroid had with digital imaging, Polaroid had the resources to make the jump but only because its managers saw more future into the idea of selling instant photo films they never did the jump. When the digital cameras were good enough for the mainstream they were completely fucked because they didn´t have any place to run. “The Industry” won´t follow the same pattern than Nintendo because they are scared to go against their main source of money.
The book also discusses whether downloadable casual games are like arcade games or not. I agree with you that they are similar in that they are “pick up and play”, and that is the way in which video games can be seen as returning to their roots.
I agree.
But in the book I also argue that downloadable casual games are also *different* from arcade games because they have a different failure/punishment structure: downloadable casual games rarely force you to start over.
From my point of view they are the same because you can take a “casual game” and an “arcade game” and play at any free moment for a few minutes. They have a different value of failure/punishment structure than the classical arcade games because the great majority of them are designed around platforms that are used for small amounts of time, a good example of it, are the games designed for the SmartPhones. In the case of the ones that are played in front of the PC the situation is the same, they are played for a small amount of time.
But all this isn´t new, handheld gaming has used the same structure (sorry but PSP doesn´t enter into the category of handheld because its games are more designed around the idea of the home console games) since the times of the original GameBoy, arcade games with different values of failure/punishment than the main console ones because they are designed to be played for small amounts of time at any moment.
Yes, the original Game Boy was a casual game platform. This is why I don´t believe that we are in front of a casual game revolution, the consumers of the “casual games” are the ones who played games in the arcade age and because the videogame market evolved to more movie like games and left behind the arcade games evolution some players stopped playing them until they resurfaced again.
19/12/2009 a las 1:01 am
¿ Que pedo con el ingles ? ¬¬ ¿ sabias que reprobé ingles en la preparatoria ? ;D jajajajajajajaja, no te creas urian!!! aunque me da flojera traducirlo toodo, creo que es parecido al post anterior!!
suerte!!
04/09/2010 a las 9:25 am
i like your article, I will always be concerned about you