First off, woo, first blog! \o/ I was planning on doing this eventually, but I never really found myself with anything I deemed even remotely postable, be it opinion or...stuff. But now I do! So here we are.

In any case, I came across a very interesting article today, written by one Sean Malstrom, a man much smarter than me apparently, that I thought I'd share. It is called Birdmen and the Casual Fallacy, and it tackles the resurgence of Nintendo and the misconception of casual games by the industry at large.

Like most gamers worth a damn, I am disgusted when I see casual games on best seller list. And like most pretentious games-as-art fags, I think casual games insult my intelligence. And thus I have been a little bit down on Nintendo and the Wii.

Then I sat down to read this, like a good little wannabe intellectual, and by the end of the article, my mind was thoroughly blown.

I would say that if you have any interest in the ongoing 'casual' vs 'hardcore' debate, or any interest in the state of the gaming industry and where it is going, this article should be required reading.

Anywhooo, linkage: http://malstrom.50webs.com/birdman.html

A small excerpt:

"Nintendo is flying high. Rather than examine the nature of this flight, the birdmen are mesmerized by the feathers. The analysts and executives do not see the concepts of disruption and don’t even understand the Blue Ocean principles (though they think they do). The feathers they see on Nintendo’s ascent are casual games. Therefore, they surmise, if they make casual games then they will be flying high with Nintendo.

There is nothing new here. Years ago, when Grand Theft Auto 3 hit big, all the birdmen began putting out Grand Theft Auto 3 clones. Years before that, it was first person shooters. More years before that, it was bloody fighters. One can find the birdmen back in the 8-bit generation making platformers. They would look at Super Mario Brothers and go, “Oh, I get it! We just need to make a game with cute music, colorful world, and upgrades like the magic mushroom!” Slapping wings on their arms, these games flopped. Amazingly, despite how many times the birdmen fall down, each generation they are ready to put on feathers and jump off a cliff."



My thoughts:

It's already been clear for a while that Nintendo has won. But that article really makes it dawn on you just how masterful their maneuvering of recent years has been.

I also love how the article so perfectly conveyed my own feelings at almost the exact moment I felt it with :" “NOOOOO!!!!” a hardcore gamer screams in sudden realization." ^_^

Personally, much like Jim posted a little while ago, I don't think the divide between games are 'hardcore' and 'casual', I think the divide is good games and sh*t games. And indeed, I do think "casual" means "retard".

And I disagree with the notion that the old 8 bit games equal the casual games of today. Couldn't be farther from the truth. A staple of the casual games of today is that they're easy as all hell and have no depth. Even Nintendo's own simplistic games are like that. Go back and play old NES games and you will get your arse handed to you in ways even the most difficult current AAA titles can't do to you. There is nothing casual about the 8 and 16 bit generation of games, despite superficial appearences that may indicate otherwise.

I also don't think Nintendo can take the upmarket, not to the point where it puts Microsoft and Sony on it's arse, simply due to the limitations of the Wii. There's always going to be a market for the biggest and best with the prettiest graphics. And the Wii can't touch that piece of the market. Nintendo simply can't move upstream enough during this generation. It'll have to change it's M.O. and put out a beast of a console next generation in order to hurt Xbox and Playstation the way this article suggests.

I think the shift here will be that Nintendo owns the lions share of the market, while Microsoft and Sony fight over smaller pieces, much like Sony owned the market the last generations while Microsoft and Nintendo quibbled over scraps, and before that, Nintendo and Sega. But in this case, those scraps happen to be the upmarket of big budget AAA titles, so life would probably not be *that* bad for the Xbox and Playstation.