Hardcore Is Mainstream
Ziff Davis Game Group's Editorial Director John Davison takes "his turn" to shed some light on hardcore gamers. Davison argues that the video game industry needs to embrace its core audience rather than constantly pitch to the mainstream.
As a collection of interrelated industries, whether we create games, sell them, or talk about them, we all seem to be obsessed with pigeonholing our consumers. It seems that every year, whether it's because of a new system launch or the enormous dollar value of our business, the word "mainstream" crops up as we hope that some mythical group of supercool casual types will flock toward videogaming, thus legitimizing our ghettoized and picked-upon efforts.
Nonsense! By the very nature of our roots, we are an enthusiast-driven industry. Our growth is predicated on consumers discovering computer and video games, being converted to our faith, immersing themselves in the culture, and taking it as their preferred form of entertainment. We need hardcore gamers. We need their passion, and their dollars, and we should never take our eyes off them.
Why? Because core gamers are the key to making videogames "mainstream."
Buh?
At E3 this year, J Allard spoke of "Striker," a consumer described as "our hardcore gamer, the lifeblood of the industry today, the guy that stands in line for 24 hours to get his hands on the next hot release first. He's a fast-twitch gamer who'll play for hours to master every level and every move before he mixes it up online with the best of the best." He really is the lifeblood of our industry, but we need to speak of him not just as an elite form of superconsumer; we need to think of him as our ultimate prize.
There's a notion that a "core gamer" is a particular type of person. We tend to define him anecdotally in terms of a limited demographic and a narrow set of tastes aside from gaming. A core gamer, we are all led to believe, is someone more interested in playing Dragon Quest VIII than speaking to a girl. He's a Nintendophile, has a questionable attitude toward personal hygiene, rarely socializes in the real world, idolizes Japanese developers, and gets his kicks from hentai. Sure, that's one particular kind of core gamer, but what if we look at this differently?
Some of you may be familiar with the Digital Gaming in America study. It's a blind study of U.S. households projected to the entire population. From it we find that within the 115 million households in the United States, 76.2 million people play computer or videogames of some sort -- an impressive statistic on its own for an enthusiast-driven business. Breaking that group down though, if we define a core gamer as someone who has bought four or more games in the past six months and plays 10 or more hours a week, we learn that there are 19.8 million of these people in the country. They represent 56 percent of the total games industry revenue and spend an average of $546 a year on games. With that in mind, it's safe to say that we are pretty far from really owning these folks.
So what is being "hardcore?" It's a form of behavior rather than an expression of taste. Really, being a core gamer is choosing to play games above any other form of entertainment. Any game can be responsible, and the step toward playing 10 hours a week or more is just the beginning of the journey. Microsoft rightly told us at E3 that "Not everyone is driven by the need to crush his opponent on the field of battle," but this doesn't immediately relegate these gamers to the rank of being "casual," does it? If you play Civilization IV for a couple of hours every night instead of reading a book, what are you? If you're one of the 5 million people playing World of WarCraft and you're a level 60 player with 600 hours logged but you never play any other game, what are you? Hardcore gaming behavior manifests itself in more ways than we tend to acknowledge, and the "gateway drug" is rarely something that's actually designed to be just that. All it takes is a single experience introduced by a friend or sparked by reading something in a magazine or online.
Bev "Grannie Gamer" McClain is 60, from Kansas, and plays videogames with a passion few of us can match. She's a regular blogger on 1UP.com and very actively part of gamer culture. She's about as far from the stereotype as it's possible to get, yet by the DGIA's criteria, she's a core gamer. She discovered games when her daughter sent her a copy of Myst for her birthday, and she was completely blown away. "Where else can a 60-year-old woman be eternally young and strong and omnipotent?" she asks. "If I can't solve the problems of the real world I live in, then I'll settle for solving world hunger and establishing peace, prosperity, and justice for all in my games!"
As the risks and costs involved with producing games continue to escalate, the need to push growth and become "mainstream" becomes more and more pressing each year. Fortunately, our greatest asset is our core audience. These guys embrace quality experiences; they evangelize with a passion that is rarely tapped to its full effect. According to the DGIA, a core gamer will spend five hours a week talking to friends about games, and they'll give up to seven people buying advice in a month.
Pitching directly to what we think is the mainstream audience is all well and good, but for true results we have to continue to engage and nurture our relationships with the ever-growing ranks of the hardcore. Only by providing them with the experiences and information they crave and nurturing community at a more grassroots level can we strengthen the foundation of our business and continue to grow. As we've all no doubt heard a thousand times from endless polls and surveys, it's the sphere of influence around these core gamers that is our most powerful tool.
Remember: There are nearly 20 million of them now.
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