     |
 |
 |
 | | | | |
 |
|||
 |
||||||
          |
 |
 |
||||
|
Analyze This: Will 'Casual' Games Dominate the Future of the Industry? "When people talk about casual games as something new, they are missing the boat: casual games have always been extremely popular. Obviously, big budget, high production games get a lot of attention and often a lot of sales. However, they are just one part of the story. "In recent years a lot of companies have focused primarily on the more hard-core consumer, although clearly that is not a demographic that is growing heavily in number. And if you look at households that own video game systems, it has not grown a great deal over the last ten, or even 15, years. It has been all about getting more revenue per user. "I think that is why the young male demographic is so heavily targeted: They spend much more per user and are fairly easy to reach via a targeted marketing campaign. The casual, mass market is much more challenging to reach and can be very much 'here today, gone tomorrow.' However, as that market gets more crowded with products, and the consumers get more demanding in what they expect regarding production values, its overall profitability declines. "A key for the industry is being able to diversify. A game system should offer all kinds of content for all types of consumers. If you go back to the original Nintendo 8-bit and 16-bit systems, you will see that those systems offered all kinds of games.
"For the N64 and GameCube, Nintendo focused primarily on its big franchises and didn't have the same level of diversity. The platform that did was the Sony PS2. Which platform could work as a karaoke machine, allowed you to put yourself in the game, had all kinds of trivia products? The reason the PSOne and PS2 sold over 100 million units each was diversity. No one title sold into more than a fraction of that user base. So casual games are one of several components for the overall game industry."
Got a business-related question concerning the games industry that you would like to suggest for discussion in Analyze This? Are you a professional analyst who covers the market and would like to take part in this column? Feel free to send an email to howardhwen@gmail.com. |
|||||||||||||||
Features
|
|
|