Stickfreaks!

Comments on casual gaming, focussing mostly on fighting games.

I play fighters and shmups exclusively. They've been my two favourite genres since I was old enough to peek over a control panel and see an arcade monitor.

Both suffer the same fate: hardcore vs casual gaming. The hardcore crowd want games to be more and more complex, with more difficult input, more skill required. Look at shmup companies like Cave who essentially aim only at the hardcore crowd, delivering games like Mushihime Sama:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ho_vR6gaIDA

Average Joe Sixpack doesn't stand a chance. I've got mates who refuse to even try that game.

ST [Super Street Fighter II: Turbo], as mentioned, requires tight timing and lots of practice. There's rarely a GOOD ST player who hasn't had quite some years of practice behind them in ST, or similar games (many of us made the jump from HF to ST back in the day, having all the experience of the previous game already).

The problem with that is hardcore games alienate casual gamers. And like it or not, money is not made from the 1% hardcore crowd, but from the 99% casual crowd. If you can't make a game that is easy to pick up and rewards gamers within a few minutes/hours of gameplay, chances are in this fickle, zero-attention-span ADD-stricken world that your game just simply won't get play time, and that means no money, and no more games in the future.

I certainly don't like the way fighting games are headed, but I can at least understand why they are headed that way. The almighty buck rules developers and publishers, and that's where the games are focussed - at whichever crowd bring in the biggest bucks. Most here would laugh at Soul Calibur III, and there's the typical anti-SSB on these forums all the time. But like it or not, those games at a retail level are pulling in the big bucks compared to more "obscure" titles.

Doujin and homebrew titles can sometimes fill that void. Certainly for shmups they do. But it seems that new homebrew fighters are all becoming very much the same (everything seems to be yet another Melty Blood clone at the moment on the Doujin scene).

Being a hardcore gamer in a limited genre is tough. The world doesn't cater to the likes of you. It caters to the EA-sports playing button mashers who really don't want to try hard to enjoy their games. That's not intended as an insult either. Each to their own. But simply put by sheer volume, the casuals outweigh the hardcores by a massive amount, and that's where the talented programmers and publishers are going to try and make a living.

While I don't like it, I certainly can't blame them. I've got kids and a mortgage too, and I work not because I love it, but because I have to.