Skip to main content

How Simple Business Common Sense will kill Casual Gaming.

Two days ago I wrote a piece surmising that the current casual gaming craze may be coming to an end. Today another "Serious games are dead, Nintendo will rule us all" article gets slashdotted and in a bizarre co-incidence yesterday I had to sit through a business meeting where a potential investor assured us we were all going to be rich if we could only come up with innovations which help competitors ape Nintendo's success with non traditional gamers. (This was a bizarre co-incidence because I didn't think I worked in the games industry).

So was my surmising no more than wishful thinking?

The business case for casual games seems incontestable. Wii, DS, PopCap have all shown the profits that can be made. Common sense dictates that the potential customer base for casual games is far larger than for serious games. There may only be a hundred million serious gamers on the planet even using the very loose definition of serious gamer as being anyone who ever played a video game that took longer than 5 minutes to learn. In contrast there are over 6 billion potential casual gamers. It's a no brainer, right?

However this simple analysis overlooks the huge difference in consumption habits between the casual gamer and the serious gamer. The casual gamer is a one time customer. They will get a Wii with Wii Sports and some singy dancy jumpy game, have a blast playing them for a while before getting bored and moving on. For the serious gamer gaming is a lifestyle. They are repeat customers who come back again and again. This is why I think the news about falling sales of Nintendo Wii in its most mature market (Japan) is significant. The Wii lacks longevity. It lacks longevity specifically because it went after the casual gamer.

Screwing over your core customer base in the tenuous hope of being able to capture and hold onto "the masses" is a bad business proposition. Remember the debacle of "New Coke" .

Comments

Anton said…
I was excited about Wii when it was new, but then I realized most of the games were aimed at kids and I regretted buying it for a little while.

They recently put out a few new rpg's though, and I'm getting into it again.

Looking at numbers, I've definitely spent more on Wii than on PC games in the last 2 1/2 years...probably over $700 on Wii, and maybe $250 on World of Warcraft...

I played more WoW, though.
mbp said…
Would you reccommend one of those RPGs Anton? I have nothing against the Wii itself its just the all the games we have got so far have been very insubstantial. I'd like to give it another chance with something meatier.
Tesh said…
If the company gets its revenue stream from the product, what's the trouble? Games in general are nto built for the long haul, hardcore or casual. Sure, there are the WoW addicts, but by and large, most games are *consumed*, and only generate revenue for a window of time in the first place.

You can't easily build a sustainable business model on either the hardcore or the casual, in other words; they are all consuming, not building relationships of service. If you can stay ahead of the consumption, you're doing well.

Oh, and the hardcore players tend to be the most fickle, when it comes to brand loyalty. They consume games and move on, like locusts. If you can't stay ahead of them with more carrots, you're going to lose them to the next flavor of the month. Casual players also have gaming ADHD, but they are also the least likely to indulge in the secondary market, if that's a concern. *shrug*

Popular posts from this blog

My First Gaming Mouse: Logitech G300

I bought a gaming mouse yesterday a Logitech G300, here my initial thoughts. What is a gaming mouse?  There are a wide variety of devices available classified as gaming mice but a few features  seem common: 1. Wired rather than wireless: Although some high end models are wireless wired connections are just better and faster than wireless so most gaming mice stick with wired. As a bonus wired mice don't need batteries so the mouse is lighter.  2. High response rate: 1 to 2ms response rate so the mouse immediately responds to input.  2. High DPI. Gaming mice invariable boast high DPI numbers from 2,000 DPI upwards. This makes the device very responsive to the smallest movements.   3. Adjustable DPI . High DPI improves responsiveness but reduces precision so gaming mice generally allow you to adjust the DPI down for precise work such as pulling off headshots in sniper mode. Generally the mouse allows dpi to be changed on the fly by pressing a button.  4. Extr

Android Tip 3: Sharing a Folder between multiple users of an Android device

Android has allowed multiple user logins for quite a while now. This is can be very useful for tablets which are shared by family members. Normally Android erects strict Chinese walls between users preventing them from using each others apps and viewing each others files. This is a useful security feature and ensures your kids don't mess up your work spreadsheets when screwing around on the tablet and should also prevent them from buying €1,000 worth of Clash of Candy coins on your account. Sometimes however you really do want to share stuff with other users and this can prove surprisingly difficult. For example on a recent holiday I realised that I wanted to share a folder full of travel documents with my wife. Here are some ways to achieve this. 1. If you have guaranteed internet access  then you can create a shared folder on either Dropbox or Google drive. Either of these has the great advantage of being able to access the files on any device and the great disadvantage of bein

Portal 2 two screen coop on one PC.

I mentioned before that I intended to try Portal 2 in "unofficial split screen co-op mode. Well split screen on a small computer monitor is a recipe for a headache especially when the game defies gravity as much as portal. However a minor bit of extra fiddling allowed us to drive two seperate screens from one PC. The Steam forums describes a complicated method of doing this that I couldn't get working so this simpler method which worked for me might be of use to someone. 1. First I followed the instructions in this post to get split screen multi-player working: http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1847904 A minor issue not mentioned is that you need to enable the console from the keyboard/mouse options menu I am using keyboard and one wired Xbox360 controller as suggested. Getting the controller to switch to channel 2 was tricky at first but as Chameleon8 mentions plugging it out and in again during loading works. The trick for me was to do the plug / p