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I'm Hardcore-Part three
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A list was released highlighting the best selling games in the world and the top two games at were Grand Theft Auto IV and Super Smash Bros. Brawl, unsurprisingly. They’re highly polished and widely popular with the hardcore. Another list has shown the best-selling games across the major platforms and each list was filled with big franchises and sequels (Madden, Metal Gear Solid, Mario Kart). Good for the business, so good for everyone right? Not so if you’re a Wii owner, which has seen Wii Play, as the third-most sold games this year so far. Wii Play, a glorified tech demo that comes with a free Wii Remote, is not that blockbuster you should expect from the house of Super Mario.
Look at all the financial records set by some games that have major hardcore appeal: Halo 3 set a one day mark with $170 million. Brawl was the fastest selling game in North America in Nintendo’s long history. So, why would Nintendo have to bother with making a ‘game’ like Wii Play? Why would any video game company want to bother going…casual?
For most hardcore gamers (like me), just the mention of the word casual can make them throw up in their mouth a little bit. The casual market is hugely successful and nowhere is the casual market more successful and apparent than the current leader of this generation’s console ‘war’: the Nintendo Wii. The company that created beloved and successful franchises such as Super Mario, The Legend of Zelda, and Metroid (all Wii versions of those franchises have sold in the millions) should in no way have to share or compete with shelf space with ‘casual’ games such as Game Party, We Cheer, and Carnival Games? One thing that drives the hate of casual games is the notion that many of these games are nothing more than shovelware: cheaply made, cheaply sold, and devoid of any amount of quality (Ninjabread Man, you’re offender number one). While the casual market is very lucrative, Wii Play has sold 11 million units since February 2007, it may be succeeding at the risk of hardcore games losing its shelf space. ‘’If you’re dealing with a fixed amount of shelf space, you might have to allocate shelf space away from the hardcore games and toward the casual,’’ said Colin Sebastian in a 2008 article in Electronic Gaming Monthly. Sebastian is an analyst with Lazard Capital Markets.
Why should hardcore games have less space in stores if it’s enjoying great sales? Why should hardcore gamers start to have fewer opportunities to find great games? The answer may come from a man who probably responsible for creating legions of Nintendo fans and hardcore gamers: Shigeru Miyamoto. “The sales [of hardcore games] all come in the first three weeks and the drop-off is so dramatic that you’re not really selling any volume after that,” said Miyamoto in a 2008 interview with Electronic Gaming Monthly. And he’s right. Brawl’s sales in the first week totaled 2.7 million copies. But with nearly 3.5 million copies total this year and six months on the shelf since it was released in March, the drop off in month-to-month sales is very dramatic. Even Metal Gear Solid 4 has been discounted in some stores in Japan.
Are those record-setting sales misleading? Hasn’t hardcore gamers and the games that they love been helping the market grow? “Where there has been growth in this business has not been with the hardcore gamer,” said Sebastian in the same article mentioned earlier. Many of the best-selling games this year, and just about every year, has been the usual suspects of franchises (GTA, Metal Gear, Mario Kart). Many games that do appeal to the hardcore, as mentioned in part 2, do get ignored. Speaking of the Wii, it has an audience that has bemoaned the lack of hardcore (and third-party) games. So, for those hardcore gamers, why hasn’t great games like No More Heroes, Okami, and Boom Blox been represented better on the charts? It makes it tougher for developers to make the games that they have been whining about buying when there’s little incentive.
Not only are there games that the hardcore for ask for and never buy, which leads to market that doesn’t grow. There has been a system that couldn’t be carried by the hardcore audience alone: Sega Dreamcast. A stellar launch, killer software, great marketing, awesome mainstream awareness…all within a span of two years, it was a great system that died too early. While part of that had to do with Sega’s corporate mismanagement, too many people were geeked on the Playstation 2.
In this cycle, one of the biggest hurdles developers have to face is just how expensive it is to make a triple-A game on any system. GTA IV cost Rockstar Games $100 million. So, it has to sell a great amount of copies to break even. But, not every game with a high budget is GTA or Zelda or Final Fantasy, which makes the casual market a safer bet. “As with any form of business true growth comes from expanding the appeal of the product to new and broader audiences. That doesn't mean
that the core can't continue to be catered to but broadening to more casual players enables companies to continue to grow the audience while still staying true to those who got them there,’’ said John Davison, president of What They Play, Inc.
So, what does it mean that hardcore gamers? Will there be less and less for us? Will we have to embrace more games based on carnival mini-games? Come back tomorrow for the final part.
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