With the release of the Wii, games that are aimed towards casual gamers, AKA “Non-games” have become increasingly popular. This can range from awesome games such as Rock Band to games like Nintendogs. Many huge publishers such as EA Games have entire departments departed to churning out more games where you can groom ponies and stuff.
This annoys me. Games used to be for the hardcore gamers, the ones who cried when Aeris died in FFVII, the ones who figured out that you could cancel animations to pull off combos in Street Fighter 2, the ones who were on their feet cheering when Daigo parried Justin Wong’s Hoyoukosen in EVO 2004 to win the semifinals. Those were the people who deserve to play video games. But nowadays it seems like every soccer mom with three hundred bucks is taking home a DS and a Wii so that her children can play Brain Age and take care of some virtual pets. While it’s great that Nintendo’s making fat sacks of cash and have sold more Wiis than XBox 360s and Playstation 3s put together, with the DS not far behind, I fear that Sony and Microsoft may decide to change their core gamer demographic and start focussing on casual gamers as well. And this better not happen. But in the meantime, I think I’m gonna sit back and see if I can beat Seth in Street Fighter 4.
Rarr.
Why have game developers started creating casual games? Why is the Wii and DS so successful in what they do? Do you think its right that companies abandon the gamers who stuck by them just so they can make more fat sacks of cash with casual games?
3 Comments
I think that Nintendo is really smart for targeting people of any age with their games. i don’t think that they are abandonning hardcore gamers because nintendo has always been for younger kids that like mario games so there isn’t that many hardcore gamers on gamecube compared to xbox which has Halo and Gears of War. If xbox and Playstation start doing the same thing as nintendo then I’ll be mad.
Nintendo is smart for targeting non-gamers because there’s moar non-gamers than “real” gamers.
Well no, it’s never right to abandon the people who made you what you are today… Nintendo show release some REAL gamers already -.-”
I don’t really play video games all that much, but I completely agree that non-games are sucky. those nintendogs are so horrible they make me want to barf every time i see a commercial for it. Its great that the companies are trying to appeal to everyone, but they’re starting to come out with waaaaay to many of those pet games. These days, there aren’t so many people that are hard-core gamers. Most people just play video games just for the sake of playing them, or just to be able to say that they are gamers. Which they aren’t. And I’m not going to pretend that I’m a gamer or that i play video games a lot. I don’t even OWN a game console. My sister is way to prissy to care about video games, and my parents don’t listen to me, therefore, no game console. But when I do go to friends houses and play video games there, I r ealise that we spend waaay more time on the new games than on the acctual original games.