Nintendo Says Casual Gaming Does Not Exist

Nintendo's Laurent Fischer says there is no such thing as a casual gamer.

In an interview with CVG, Nintendo Europe's senior marketing director claimed that gaming is an all-or-nothing proposition, and that in his mind, people are either gamers or non-gamers. "I think most of you know that you can spend ten or twenty hours on an internet flash game and have not realized. The guy who plays these games regularly -- he's a core gamer," Fischer said.

"Someone who is fifty years old who only plays Brain Training, but plays it like a core gamer is a core gamer," he continued. "I don't like this word 'casual' so much. Because people consider that casual needs to be something easy. If you're good at any game you can play at a high difficulty level. Take Tetris. There is incredible gameplay, it's very simple, very easy to understand, but it's also very different. I think a game can be light enough to enjoy and for all gamers to become a core gamer on it."

"There is no casual gaming," he said. "There is just a different way to play."

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And people who play less than 10 or 20 hours....?

Really, unless I was locked in a windowless room with a catheter and IV, I think I'd notice 10 hours go by.

Casual gamer: someone who really doesn't give a shit whether about games or whether they will win or not, they're just killing time until they feel relaxed enough to tackle what they really have to get done.

I know many casual gamers and they are mostly women. They surface amongst the blase college crowd during crunch time, where they will be working on a 12 - 15 page paper and alt+tab every 3 hours to play a flash game or have sex.

I think the term "Casual Gamer" exists for the sake of the 40 year old house wife. She may be hooked on peggel and spend 5 hours a day on it. But when conversing with her 40 year old house wife friends she needs to draw a distinction between her and the pail, pimple faced, stereo type of the hard core gamer. So she says "Casual Gamer" and suddenly everything is ok. Ultimately titles only have as much power as we give them. Just like Herculean Exemplar Yahtzee.

My goodness, Nintendo has just claimed that the majority of their customers don't exist.

I think what Nintendo is trying to do is get people to stop saying they are catering to a certain crowd.

The way I see it, the casual gamer is into video games as equally as they are into books or movies. I am not a movie buff, and while I do enjoy reading, I do not keep up with the industry. However, I follow the gaming industry very heavily.

The hardcore gamer is going to be the person that checks out how the industry is doing, what it has up its sleeve, etc. They are "game buffs", if you will.

The difference is, it used to be that the majority of gamers were hardcore. That's been changing since the Playstation came about, as there are plenty of people that will play games like Call of Duty 4, even, but they have never heard of Brutal Legend, Dead Space, Deadly Creatures or Spore Men.

We're reaching the point where games are a mainstream medium, and pretty soon you'll have people that play games as often as they go to see a movie.

is this guy STUPID or something?????

j-e-f-f-e-r-s:
My goodness, Nintendo has just claimed that the majority of their customers don't exist.

:)
On the same hand, what he's saying is that it's all relative, in that those who buy a Wii and play Sports on it on and on, are becoming core gamers on this game.

Now, this digresses largely from the general meaning of core gamer, which points to higher times spent on games, and in genres which are not going to reach all audiences.

I'm actually inclined to agree with him. I read a well-written article recently called "Birdmen and the Casual Fallacy" which illustrates his point. There's no real 'casual' gamer, because everyone plays games on some level or another. When it comes to a video game, there's no real difference. You have simple puzzle games like Tetris or Bejewelled which can be enjoyed by a low-tier gamer as much as a hardcore gamer; you slowly work up, through Wii Sports to Mario Kart, up to adventure games like Zelda, and then onto the gritty, difficult Call of Duty games and end up at the twitch-response Real Time Strategy games where you simultaneously need arcade reflexes to command your army and need to perform resource management, allocation and math simultaneously.

The problem is that when people say "casual gamer" they think "idiot gamer". So they assume simple, basic games which don't hold the hardcore player's attention for 5 seconds, and could attract the attention of a lower-tier gamer for an hour at best if it was a free flash game. They rarely scale in difficulty, they have some purported benefit (brain age, fitness age) and they're rarely high quality in production. While Wii Sports seems to meet this criteria, it's incredibly high production quality, the difficulty scales across all modes (the advanced golf courses are a chore) and the "purported benefit" is the only crime it's guilty of.

Developers mistakenly believe there is a casual boom. They're wrong: the audience always existed, and they played games back when games were simpler (Pacman, Space Invaders, Lemmings). Either due to growing up or cost, they didn't progress with the industry. Now the industry during the 6th generation (PS2, XBX, NGC) was all AAA titles with complex controls, two analogue sticks, tactile triggers... how on earth is anyone new to gaming meant to get into that? Nintendo has successfully disrupted this, and now everyone else is chasing their example and not actually trying to work out WHY Nintendo's strategy worked.

Let me make the distinction clear for the hangers-on who jumped straight from the short bus into my hobby:

Hardcore - people who keep buying games out of some idiotic habit despite needless complications with hardware, absurd prices, disappointing "AAA" wankfests and/or thoroughly corrupt review industry who seem to have an extreme aversion toward actually fulfilling their function

Casual - everyone else

So, "casual" is at best a useless synonym. "Not retarded" works well enough that we really don't need to coin a new term.

ccesarano:
We're reaching the point where games are a mainstream medium, and pretty soon you'll have people that play games as often as they go to see a movie.

I shudder to speak of that day... I mean, gaming'll be dumbed down for the masses, and all those that love and cherish gaming will be a niche market, only given the bones of the industry...

I think I'll lay off the meds for a while...

Next on Tonight's Breaking News:

Sony Boss says that Sonic isn't really blue.

Here's Tom with the Weather.

Arbre:

:)
On the same hand, what he's saying is that it's all relative, in that those who buy a Wii and play Sports on it on and on, are becoming core gamers on this game.

Now, this digresses largely from the general meaning of core gamer, which points to higher times spent on games, and in genres which are not going to reach all audiences.

Wow, 5 ons in that first sentence, impressive.

I think the problem is that everyone has a different definition of the "casual gamer." Some people think it's people who only play for short amounts of time. Some people think people who only play simple games are casual gamers. Nintendo apparantly has a different definition because according to them, casual gamers don't exist.

So what is a casual gamer?

I can see where he's coming from, but completely disagree. Many of the 'casual' gamers that I know are simply ex-gamers that do not have the time anymore, they were once 'core-gamers' but no longer have the time for it.

And to think EAs new selling point is "casual" hopefully they'll do that to death enough so that everyone else stops.

In the words of Michael Caesar, "Any minute now, I'm going to figure out why that offends me." :-)

Markness:

Arbre:

:)
On the same hand, what he's saying is that it's all relative, in that those who buy a Wii and play Sports on it on and on, are becoming core gamers on this game.

Now, this digresses largely from the general meaning of core gamer, which points to higher times spent on games, and in genres which are not going to reach all audiences.

Wow, 5 ons in that first sentence, impressive.

I think the problem is that everyone has a different definition of the "casual gamer." Some people think it's people who only play for short amounts of time. Some people think people who only play simple games are casual gamers. Nintendo apparantly has a different definition because according to them, casual gamers don't exist.

So what is a casual gamer?

Someone who's not a core gamer. Easy.

Obviously, anyone who manages to beat me at Soul Calibur by smashing the joypad like a monkey on coffee overdose is a casual gamer.
Safe bet.

j-e-f-f-e-r-s:
My goodness, Nintendo has just claimed that the majority of their customers don't exist.

Ha! Amazing. Thanks for making me giggle girlishly. I love it.

Umm, I think mostly everything about casual gaming has been said here. I try to make some of my other girl friends into the dozens and dozens of hours a week (and sometimes per day) gamer that I am, and the closest I get is dragging them to Dave and Busters where they spend five dollars worth of tokens playing a car sim, ski ball, or the Simpsons fighting game.

I would hardly call that hardcore gaming.

And yeah, I think anyone who has a console might have a bit more of a tendency to game more frequently, but that's not always the case... like what about the dad who plays rock band with his kid every few weeks?

Or any Wii party game...