The Casual Gaming Market Goes Literally Insane

So now we will only be able to play Kongregate’s 3 million flash games if we’ve pre-ordered them?

Fucking casuals!

Yes, no one is buying games in stores anymore. No one buys used console games except through ebay, because waiting a week to get a game shipped to you is more fun than driving down the street for five minutes to buy them along with the pizza for game night. Gamestop is not making money hand over fist by buying and reselling these console games at outrageous markups.
Seriously, I don’t see why they’d buy kongregate. Any ideas? I can’t see it as a good mix for its business, which is mostly used console games and accessories.

I sense an industry bubble is about to burst real soon….

It seems to me Gamestop’s model should be secure seeing as buying physical copies of console games is still cheaper than buying the digital copies. Last I checked the prices are almost exactly the same, but you can trade in, loan, or borrow physical copies, or sell them on eBay. Are they failing despite this? If Gamestop is failing, it’s because of competition from Best Buy/Future Shop/other big box stores for those same physical console games. New prices are the same, but trade-in and used game selection/prices can be better at the bigger stores.

I’m right there with ya, hellfire.  I remember when going to Gamestop was like a trip to the bookstore.
Nowadays I’m better off just sticking to D2D.

I’ve been saying that for years.  Ironic that the brick-and-mortar stores have moved so much of their sales to the console stuff considering that a simple GameFly subscription makes purchasing console stuff largely obsolete while doing nothing for PC.  Granted, they’ve got some reasons.
 
First, the PC market is massively pirated, some numbers going as high as 9 out of 10 copies of a game are pirated.  Yes, it’s an entirely separate argument how man wouldn’t have bought the game anyway.  However, the bottom line is that a lot of PC game developers are going to look at that and think to themselves, “shit, I better take distribution of my game into my own hands, whether it be to go through my own distribution network (e.g. Stardock’s Impulse), make my game require subscriptions/micropayments to play (thus the glut of MMORPGs and DLC), or just release their games on some oddball free/advertisement supported mechanism (Kongregate s one such model).   Whichever you choose, that’s less PC support at GameStop.
 
Second, Digital Distribution is here to stay, with about as many PC game sales done online as there are offline.  GameStop themselves does this this through their website for many titles because they know that, as middle men, they can either be cut out entirely or get a piece of that action.  PC games and PSP games are the primary platforms that can completely circumvent the need for ever visiting the shop, and it’s no coincidence that these are the two platforms that will have the least shelf space.
 
So it’s not that PC gaming industry is dead, per se, but rather going in some new directions.   GameStop has found their niche for survival, and it is this: as swap shops.  Take your used games into GameStop and sell them for a fraction of their value, and GameStop will turn right around and sell that game to others for several times what they paid you.  PC Games need not apply, largely because they run on serial codes which are not reusable.  Thus, when you go into GameStop, you will see shelves upon shelves of not just console crap, but used console crap.

Regarding GameStop, I remember the last time I went to an EB store (last April), and it was a sad sight. Like Hellfire above, I saw that the PC gaming section, which once had taken up an entire wall just a few years ago, had been pushed back and back until it was reduced to just a corner. And the selection they had was not better: very few high-profile titles, a lot of educational or cheap adventure games, most of which I’d never heard of, and more than a few had been there long enough for their price tags to have turned yellow. Plenty of console games, though; and looking at the shelves, I thought to myself, with quite too much self-loathing to my liking, “I’m too old for this.”

The console is back, with every company aping one another over the next fad; but what’s the point to bicker over which of Kinect or Move will better fulfill its promises — not that I care, since I don’t own a console — when it’s their basic principle that is fatally faulty? When I end up on the same side of a debate as Yahtzee, something is not quite right — and recently I seem to agree with him all the time.

To put it succinctly: What the hell has happened to gaming? It’s not that I’m older, and I’m not one to go for rhetoric like ‘filthy casuals’. I just think it’s that the industry has now lost the last vestiges of its ‘homespun’ nerdy aspect, to replace it with crass mainstream commercialism; and whoever says crass mainstream commercialism, coupled with increasing production costs, means a general dumbing-down of what is offered. All in over-exploited franchises that used to mean something, but not anymore. What a coincidence, the high festival of vacuous gaming has just concluded in San Diego.

Paradoxically, all those AAA studios are expecting their clientele to keep up with Moore’s Law as well as they do, even in the middle of a recession, leaving out an (I suspect) increasing number of people. Case in point: Final Fantasy XIV; Keen of Keen and Graev wrote a post on trying out the FFXIV benchmark only to find out that his computer was incapable of running the game, and he bought it at around the time Age of Conan came out — two years ago. Really, they’re expecting a minimum of 1.5GB RAM on a Windows XP system? So no money for SquareEnix from me.

Maybe that’s why ‘social gaming’ and the ‘casual market’ are really growing while the more ‘hardcore’ market, outside of WoW, is stagnating; not because your average gamer is too busy changing diapers to dedicate his entire free time to video games, but because the money is lacking, and he has nowhere else to go. And your average person does not buy a new computer for Age of Conan only to throw it out two years later when the next shiny game comes out; in my case, my most recent computer is from 2007, which I use for gaming (an ever dwindling selection these days), but for everyday tasks, I prefer the sturdy reliability of my 2004 antique.

I think it’s where all those developing companies make a mistake: The casual market isn’t one of choice, or of lifestyle; the casual market is in fact a captive one. Give or take a few ‘hardcore’ games with unpopular features (FFA PvP, full-loot, etc), is there a natural boundary between a player of WoW (the closest to casual among traditional games) and, say, EVE or Age of Conan or Warhammer Online? A Tale in the Desert, casual or not? Wurm Online, casual or not? Puzzle Pirates, casual or not? (The last might be a typical “casual” title, but I have known people who played it hour after hour after hour. Some journeys lasted a full three hours; how does that compare to your average WoW raid?) Apart from those games where victory is guaranteed to the largest group who grinds the most, I find that we can’t really talk of a rift between casual and regular gaming, except on a technological/economic scale. As a result of it, I’m thrown in with the casuals, much against my own will.

Vetarnias: To put it succinctly: What the hell has happened to gaming?

The same thing that happened to movies and music. It became an Industry.

I’m all for growth. I’m also all for digital distribution. Not necessarily because I like the model (I’m ambivalent) but because Valve has pretty much done it 100% right. The only major issue I have with Steam at this point is that they allow games to be ported in without *completely* removing their DRM. Steam just verified my game purchase as legit, please keep your grubby SecuROM off my rig, thanks. I still use Impulse for all my Stardock purchases. I could buy them through Steam as well, but folks who ship games without DRM deserve 100% of my dolla-dolla bills.
 
I think back to the days of the Gold Box games and seeing a copy of Wing Commander on the shelf. I had heard nothing of the game up until that point. It may not matter in the long run, but I think we lose something pretty important when we divorce ourselves from that physical experience. I think of it like new comic day. Maybe it’s just nostalgia. I still remember walking into Radio Shack with every intention of buying a new remote for my hobby-built RC car and, instead, walked out with Pool of Radiance.

@Stupid

The problem I see with consoles, however, is that they fare rather badly for strategy games. Sure, they’re an ideal platform for twitch-based games, but can you imagine playing an intricate strategy game, say Civilization V, on a console, when you need to point and click and micromanage everything?

I would have nothing against consoles (though if all games were only available through them, I’d give up on gaming altogether), except when they start having an impact on the type of games that get made. I don’t care for FPS — I’ve never had quick reflexes, so I’m quite lousy at them — and there seems to be less variety in today’s console game genres than there was in the time of the NES. As it stands, the only advantage of consoles I can see is that you know that the game will run on it, as opposed to the crapshoot that is your average computer game.

The Wiimote certainly broke some ground, but as I mentioned above, I believe Kinect and PS Move are going in the wrong direction, and I think they will fail. That’s not wishful thinking; Wii was “casual” and “family-friendly” enough (cue in my friend’s ‘filthy casuals’), but xBox and PS3 avoided going in that direction from the start, and now they’re going for the same “casual” appeal they never tried to reach in the first place. But their core gamer demographic doesn’t want to move around to play their games; I suspect they’re perfectly content to behave as couch potatoes and let their thumbs do all the work. In addition, such gimmicks only succeed in linking their in-game achievements to their physical prowess, and how many traditional gamers want that? How many gamers are, like me, physically inept? If I wanted physical exercise, I’d buy a treadmill, step outside, or join the army. I’m just surprised the Wii managed to pull it off.

Worse, there is no immersion. I’ve always been fascinated by virtual reality (yes, I’m so 1993), and I despise seeing the term being applied to a wider range of products that have nothing to do with it. An appealing form of VR would be, for example, a bicycle racing game with you on the bike, and the image projected inside a helmet visor (as if you were really wearing a biking helmet). The immersion would be as complete as could be, and your movements, even though you would probably be no Lance Armstrong, would actually make sense in relation to the game itself. Kinect is but a crude version of motion capture (I still haven’t forgotten that Project Natal video last year), and what’s more, movement reproduction is a mere approximation; so you just end up looking stupid, no matter how much ad money Microsoft and Sony can blow getting people with strenuous gaming credentials like Felicia Day to demonstrate it to the awed masses blocking circulation at your nearest gaming convention to tell you otherwise. (Not to mention: I don’t have that amount of space to move around, and I wonder what the neighbour downstairs would say if I started a Kinect gaming routine when I usually play, at 4 in the morning. But I know, I get the message: it’s not for me. I don’t know who it’s for, though.)

I find it ironic that they’ve canned box sales for the most part. It used to be faster to get to walmart and pick up a copy of diablo 2 than to pirate diablo 2. Now they’re making me choose between downloading it legally and pirating, they need to thank their stars that D2D maxes out my connection, or there would be no reason for me to legally download (I have no soul).