Rockstar Games Afraid of Casual Gaming?
Posted on May 3, 2008 - Filed Under Casual Gaming, Editorials, Nintendo Wii, PlayStation 3, Xbox 360 |
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Rockstar Games VP Dan Houser seems to have some fear in the rise of casual gaming as an industry mover and shaker. Houser told New York Magazine, “Yeah, f*** all this stuff about casual gaming, I think people still want games that are groundbreaking. The Wii is doing something totally different, which is fantastic. We’re hopefully going to prove that there’s also a very big audience for people who want entertainment in another form, who think of games as being a narrative device that can challenge movies.”
GTA IV will have no problem posting numbers which will save their end of quarter results, for sure, but what is with the harsh attack on casual gaming? Is it fear?
The gaming market is definitely big enough for two industries of gaming concepts: casual and ground breaking movie-like entertainment. Will casual games impact the sales figures for large multi-million dollar game development projects? Doubtful.
Believe it or not, casual games have existed for may years, they just never received as much exposure. Than along comes some big companies like PopCap games, Nintendo and publishers like MumboJumbo, BigFishGames and Reflexive who are putting some marketing dollars into their games and are grabbing some attention.
Nintendo has obviously shown that casual gaming is a huge market with limitless growing potential but many electronic game downloads are sharing the wealth as well. Rockstar shouldn’t fear a growing casual game market because history has shown that casual games have evolved over time to something a bit more “hardcore.”
Casual gaming is a “gateway drug” to longer more “ground breaking” technologies like Grand Theft Auto, Gears of War, Oblivion, Bioshock and others. Some gamers may evolve into strategy players, others into RPG players and some for first-person-shooters while a bulk of them stay with their casual gaming roots.
Many of these game developers got their start with Missile Command, Donkey Kong, Pitfall and Centipede yet today their playing games that rival a box office movie title in popularity, revenue and cost. If an individual was inspired by Elevator Action or Pitfall and became a block buster game developer, who is to say a Diner Dash player can’t follow the same path?
It’s true that much of the casual gaming industry is female but women can become developers, marketers, publishers and launch their own studios too.
To those developers and publishers afraid of the casual game market I say, stop whining and dropping “F” bombs upon us, look at us as a “farm team” for future growth in your own industry.
(Thanks, NextGen)
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[...] you’d have a great life simulator for all ages. Although some folks at rockstar might be afraid of casual games, they sure do use the recipe for success in GTA [...]