Game Stooge

Nintendo: “There’s No Such Thing as Casual Games”

• Scribbled on May 15th, 2008 by Jonah Falcon
• Filed in Casual Gaming, Editorial Content, Interviews, Nintendo Wii

CVG is reporting that Nintendo is huffing at the term “casual games”, and have claimed, “There’s no such thing as casual games!”

Nintendo Europe’s senior marketing director Laurent Fischer says the casual gamer is a myth and that there are only people who play games and people who don’t.

“For me, you are a gamer or non-gamer,” he told CVG at Nintendo’s German HQ yesterday. “I think most of you know that you can spend ten or twenty hours on an internet flash game and have not realised. The guy who plays these games regularly - he’s a core gamer…Someone who is fifty-years old who only plays Brain Training, but plays it like a core gamer is a core gamer…”I don’t like this word casual so much. Because people consider that casual needs to be something easy. If you’re good at any game you can play at a high difficulty level…Take Tetris. There is incredible gameplay, it’s very simple, very easy to understand, but it’s also very different. I think a game can be a light enough to enjoy and for all gamers to become a core gamer on it…There is no casual gaming. There is just a different way to play.”

Something tells me that Fischer is more wary of the perceived stigma of casual games, and not what casual games are. The fact is this: if the game has simple controls and can be played in 10-15 minute spurts, it’s a casual game, by DEFINITION.

There seems to be a need to cater to the minority (”hardcore gamers”) than there is to the majority. The fact is, the industry began with casual games (hello? coin operated arcade games are casual games), and there will always be casual games. If Nintendo is so concerned about the perception of the Wii being only for casual games, there’s a solution: make more complex games and ditch the Wiimote. If casual games sell on the Wii, they’ll continue to be made. Stop fighting casual games and embrace them, and admit that casual games rule on the Wii - and will continue to the more you foist the Wiimote on games, too.