Casual Takeover?

As somebody who would typically be branded as a hardcore gamer, I am started to see a worrying trend in the games of today which immediately set alarm bells ringing for me. I think the image at the start of this post might give you a little hint as to what I am talking about, coupled with the title being a summary of my fears. Gaming seems to be going very casual.

With the success of Nintendo's Wii and DS, gaming has truly broken that barrier standing between it and the 'regular' human being, allowing it to reach far more people than the antisocial hermits we hardcore gamers are often seen as. Suddenly games are about everyday life, and apparently we don't get enough of that in, well, everyday life.

The bestsellers on the Wii are Wii Sports (basically by default) and Wii Play. Anybody who has played these games will attest to the fact that they are fun and easily accessible to everyone, but this comes with the tradeoff that they have almost no depth or replayability past the first hour or so of playing. However, ridiculous amounts of sales are testament to the fact that these arguably worse, shallower games are what the public want, and that gaming is moving away from it's roots.

Now, this wouldn't seem too alarming, if it weren't for the fact that the success of casual games has put dollar signs in every publisher's eyes in place of their pupils. 'These shallow, cheap to make games are selling really well. What we should do is capitalise on this, and release our own slew of equally shallow, cheap to make games. This is a surefire scheme to transfer my pupils into real money for me to roll around in. And the hardcore gamers won't be able to do anything about it, since they're in such a minority. Huzzah!' How many times have marketing execs had these thoughts, I do not know, but I'd bet on it being more often now than it was even a year ago.
If this trend continues, then what we hardcore guys are looking at is the slow erosion of the levels of skill and practice required to play our most loved titles, until eventually everywhere you look in a games store will yield nothing but 'casual' games. My message to devs: casual doesn't have to mean shallow.

But then with every cloud is a silver lining, and in this case the silver linings are few and far between, if still in existence. The fact that so many people are playing casual games could lead to the unlikely outcome of these people wanting to progress onto more challenging titles, helping to sell more of the Half Lifes and Metal Gears of the gaming world. However unlikely this seems, consider the fact that if even one in every ten casual gamers advances their gaming to the next level, this will still probably be more people than those who start playing hardcore games unprompted.

Another plus point is that with every fat kid who loses weight because of Wii Fit, the press will concentrate less and less upon violence and sex in videogames, and more and more upon how 'Wii Sports saved my son from obesity'. Okay, maybe we're not quite at that level yet, but we should see games becoming less of a scapegoat for crime and bad behaviour over the coming years.

So basically, casual gaming is fine, if not a very good thing, for gaming, unless it starts eating into more hardcore experiences, which has slowly started to happen. There is certainly a market for both types of games, and as long as developers realise that their game will still sell even if it uses more than four buttons.