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This post originally appeared on Point Line Square.
The game industry continues to believe that casual and hardcore players are separate monolithic audiences interested solely in games reflecting their respective play styles. The latest entry along these lines is the mid-core game, which seeks to claim a middle ground between the two.
The underlying case for mid-core players is genuine enough: there are many players who would like a deeper, more engaging experience without the burden of a steep learning curve or large time commitment.
But mid-core comes up short for the same reasons traditional casual and hardcore thinking does:
- It confuses product specific engagement and commitment characteristics (where they are valid) with demographic characteristics (where they are not). To claim there is an audience of casual players, hardcore players, and now mid-core players outside the scope of a single product is nonsensical. These are different people for different products, and one game’s hardcore player is another’s casual player. And remember: everyone is hardcore about something.
- It falsely assumes there is a spectrum of play from casual to hardcore where a given product falls, instead of treating casual and hardcore play as separate and compatible in the same game. To make a game more casual is to make it more accessible; to make it hardcore is to make it more engaging. Good casual design increases a player’s willingness to play but does nothing to increase their desire to play. Good hardcore design improves a player’s desire to play but does nothing to increase their willingness to play.
- It takes a very narrow view of player behavior: that an individual seeks the exact same play experience every time they sit down to play.
Of these, the last is most important. In the busy, chaotic world we all live in, our ability to engage and commit to a product varies from day to day. When you build for mid-core, you haven’t addressed this problem any better than casual or hardcore approaches because you’re still building for a fixed level of player engagement. Which means you’re still going to lose consumers when they want to engage more and there’s nothing interesting to do, or you require them to engage more and they don’t have the time.
It’s a lot like picking a single price point for your product — it can work, but it’s not terribly efficient compared to free-to-play models. And it’s a poor strategy for any product hoping to build a long term relationship with the player.
We should enable high levels of casual and hardcore play in the same product, not find a happy medium between the two. Doing so doesn’t re-align your product with a different demographic or change the level of engagement; it expands your product’s audience to include a much greater number of players, without sacrificing one group to make room for another.
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When I actually sit down to play, it'll be an MMO, or a shooter, or a strategy game, or whatever. Casual vs hardcore is often a situational thing rather than a demographic one. Sure, you have your strictly-casual gamers that only play on Facebook or phones. You have your strictly-hardcore that travel with a beefy laptop everywhere they go. But midcore? There really isn't a situation halfway between waiting in line somewhere and sitting at home in front of your XBox.
I would argue, though, that midcore can exist because of the dentist example you described. In my own experience, I've had to downshift my game time because of professional and family requirements -- but I still love games that are ridiculously engaging, that I read about every chance I get, that I binge on for hours when I can carve out the time to do it. I change between a casual gamer (work, family, etc) to a hardcore gamer (binge sessions) depending on my situation and environment.
I think it's far more useful to think of games as experiences that have lots and lots of different touchpoints, and game developers and publishers should think of those touchpoints as a larger journey through their game. Some touchpoints will allow hardcore, high skill, high learning curve play. Others will only require a moment's time. All of those *can* be part of the game experience, and it's at that point that we can break from "hardcore" or "casual" and start to develop flexible experiences that don't care about either category.
Stating the obvious? Yes. But then most of the industry is not following the obvious. Not all titles are going to stretch the full range, but when you start with "I'm going to make a mid-core game (or casual or hardcore)", you've created a false constraint that limits what is possible.
As for data, would you disagree that most titles we consider "casual" churn audience too fast, and that most of what we consider "hardcore" put up ridiculous barriers to initial entry and require too much commitment to keep playing? When we think of games as being casual or hardcore we accept this as normal, and it leads to concepts like "mid-core" that simply look at a different slice (less casual than casual, less hardcore than hardcore) instead of expanding both.
Luis: I do think there are some better approaches for expanding casual and hardcore play in the same product (well, one in particular) – that's for the next couple blog posts.
Matt: I think the open question is whether you can give someone the opportunity to engage with the same game in a casual manner or a hardcore manner, depending on the circumstances. I think it's possible, and increasingly important, to have this flexibility for long term success.
A good product isn't synonymous with mass market, it has more to do with having numerous meta games within it (breadth) and each of them being a fully baked and entertaining experience (depth).
It's a big gamble, because if your new audience isn't into the product you've already isolated your original fanbase.
The new DMC is a great example of how not to treat your core audience by calling them whiny, entitled, or boiling their arguments down to something like hair color on a character.
Mid-core sounds like another artificially constrained bucket "positioned between packaged products or hardcore MMO games, whether on console or PC, and the "new gamer" targeted casual titles served up in droves on mobile and social platforms". Also: "the mid-core digital game segment comprises players looking for a more in-depth experience than a casual game, [and] not as time-consuming as a core game, both in terms of learning curve and game play progression". You do add in the comments above that "elements are mixed in a single game and cater to almost any gamer", so perhaps you really mean that mid-core isn't in-between, but instead encompasses everything we get in both casual and hardcore interpretations of a game. Would that be a fair interpretation? If so, that would be in alignment with everything in my post, but perhaps at odds with how mid-core is being discussed in the industry (and "mid-core" would be an odd way to describe it).
I'm not sure slicing this by demographic or by screen is any better – you'd still be making general assumptions about audience interest and behavior based on who they are and what they play on, instead of what they play and how they play (that said, I do find demographic and screen data useful once I've identified an audience for a specific title and want to understand what else they like, what their time constraints are, what screens they have, etc).