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Casual Gamers - Importance to the Real Gamers »

Authored by weaver on 2007-07-18 10:52:15 AM

A report come out today from an esteemed organization called "The Casual Game Association'. To most of us more "hard core gamers".. which is a nuanced word for any of us that don't play "casual games", we don't really care about this "casual" audience. Seriously, when is the last time one of us played any of these awesomely titillating games?

* Mystery Case Files
* Diner Dash
* Cake Mania
* Bejeweled
* Slingo

However, I would like to make an arguement for why we "real" gamers should care. These are moms, older generation, and tweens coming up and playing these games. These are the same type of games we played as kids as well. They were cheap, in the arcade, available on a little pocket-pc. Some percentage of this very LARGE audience is going to get overly addicted and move up in their appetite.
Don't get me wrong - their next level up might simply be to play Desktop Tower Defender.. hardly a jump into the realm of hard-core gaming (though, I play it.. so we would have a convergence in the audiences). The size of the audience for hard-core gaming, be that on the PC to the PS3 and WII is going to grow naturally as young people become gamers directly. But, a small percentage of these casual gamers will migrate naturally also into the console gaming or PC gaming markets and expand our own audience base.

The potential size of the casual gaming market is 10-20 times bigger then the potential existing market for hard-core gaming. If our audience group captures just 10% of the casual gaming market as a new audience.. then suddenly hard-core gaming audiences DOUBLE or QUADRUPLE in a relatively small time span. The larger our audience, the more money that will be spent developing games for the various niches among our audience - from FPS to MMO to Arcade racing.

Remember - It won't be long until that 8 year old is kicking your butt in WOW or CS:Source..

Casual gaming has been around since the days of Pong. It was once more popular then hard-core gaming. Hard-core gaming took over the media and press over the past decade and I find it hard to imagine the media getting hooked on screen shots of 'Slingo'. Still, more media and press attention will focus on this new generation of gamers. We should all pay attention and do our best to suck them into the dark side of the force!

To see the recent press release from the Casual Gamer Association check it out here.

This authors current favorite game is actually borderline CASUAL and HARD-CORE. DEFCON - From http://www.everybody-dies.com/
Download it from SpawnPoint's Defcon Profile!

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