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Features

Analyze This: Will 'Casual' Games Dominate the Future of the Industry?
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They are the professional analysts whose job it is to research, keep track of, advise their clients, and opine to the media about the gaming business. Analyze This cuts right to the chase: Rather than reporting on a subject, and throwing in quotes by analysts to support or refute a point, Gamasutra offers up a timely question pertaining to the business side of the video game industry and simply lets the analysts offer their thoughts directly to you.
Each person's opinion is his or her own and will (probably) not necessarily agree with their fellow colleagues'.
Question: Nintendo is betting on a more "casual gaming" experience for the Wii, and Microsoft has found success in Xbox Live Arcade. "Simpler" games have already achieved enormous success on the Nintendo DS. (Over on the PC gaming side, for several years now, Web games such as Yahoo!'s gaming service have done extremely well, and EA's The Sims franchise has been a long-time staple for that company.) So could casual gaming be the future for the entire video game industry?

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In relation to the first question, what do you think could be the future for "traditional" video games, where graphics realism takes precedence? Could this market shrink into a niche?
If the casual gaming audience is indeed potentially larger, why are most developers still so fixated on sophisticated graphics and selling to a young male demographic that appears to be shrinking in overall number?
Next: Michael Pachter
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