“Here’s a simple truth, though. The market’s only followed the money. The average person does not get more time to game as they get older. As husbands and wives, careers, kids, bills, and mortgages enter the picture, gaming time tends to slide until it either disappears or the classification on your gamer card changes entirely. MMOs are becoming more casual because, you guessed it, we’re becoming more casual.”
Quote of the Day
Bio Break 
And there you have it. Best summary of the whole debate I have seen yet.
Youngsters!
Once your children leave home you’ll find you have almost all that time you used to have back again. And when you retire (not there yet but it’s coming) you’ll have more time available for personal use than you’ve ever had in the whole of your life (except possibly when you were at university if, like me, you studied English!)
What we’re seeing now is the bubble of MMO players who began playing five or ten years ago as teenagers, students and young, single adults finding themselves with jobs and families. I wouldn’t wish being 30 – 45 on anyone!
Give it another ten-fifteen years and the bubble will be pushing out of its period of core adult responsibility. Then we might see some interesting developments.
Oops! Spelled my own name wrong! You might want to correct that for me, Syp and delete this post. If there’s an edit button i can’t see it.
Erm… MMOs are becoming more casual because there is apparently more money to be made that way. That you, I, or the next guy have less free time (maybe, I think we all find time to do the things we really want to do) doesn’t really enter into it. There are always younger players coming up to fill the hardcore slots older players vacate.
I think most (everyone) is missing Syncaine’s point. Although “shorter” single serving MMO’s are part of the problem the real issue is the dumbing down of the industry.
A dungeon or a boss doesn’t have to be Absolute Virtue to still be interesting or hard. Time spent is just a shallow method for developers to enhance their dungeons. A dungeon can consume all of 15 minutes and still require the strategy and planning of first (2nd?) generation MMO’s. Just because you get wiped in a particularly hard raid doesn’t mean the raid is bad.
When it comes down to it Syn seems most worried that video games are going by way of the rest of the world. Everything is “Me Me Me” “I HAVE TO WIN” “I deserve everything!” “I don’t need to work for anything.”
Essentially MMO players are becoming the self entitled little shits rioting on CNN that we love to criticize.
I’m tired of this “things are too easy now” talk. If you ever played UO or EQ then that was the definition on easy mode. Nearly every fight was simply a tank and spank zerg fest. Even WoW had a group of 40 clerics kill onyxia when it was cutting edge content. The hard part was running against a wall of death for 6 hours a night.
Now days you need to watch for the purple lights, not the green ones that heal, click on the button every 5 seconds to interrupt the death spell and jump up and down the whole fight while humming jingle bells. Games are harder now. Firelands has a 5% completion rate. If that isn’t screaming no one cares for your raids anymore, what else do you need to see?
Mmo demographics show clearly that the age group is mid 30s. Yes there are people on either end but when the majority says go left, you go left.
@Wilhelm, you’re not really disproving the premise there. There’s more money to be made in casual MMOs because our generation is becoming more casual AND the younger generation can play too. If games weren’t following the older demographic they’d lose us as customers and yes, we’d be replaced. But you don’t grow an industry by replacing lost customers, you make money by expanding your customer base. Thus, casual = more money.
@Warsyde – And your point is not exactly fleshed out by the numbers either. Going causal goes way beyond chasing attrition. Blizz and its industry mates are chasing many more new bodies than the older players ever represented. That we think that we represent an exceptionally important demographic is just ego.
Well said indeed. It is a process that I am going through myself, as I am sure Syp is too, being four years my senior.
There are times when I want to form up the 40-man raiding wrecking ball I started in vanilla WoW days and go back to the glory days, but a part of me knows my life will never allow that again.
@Asmiroth @wliore: I think you’re both right. Consider WoW: the problem is that the difficult curve takes a ridiculous turn from “solo leveling” to “raiding”. It also goes from being a “pick-up-and-go” activity to “hours of planning and playing consecutively”. Ultimately, I think a lot of people without the ability to play for hours in a row scheduled end up bored, and those who have the free time are resentful that the “casuals are ruining their game” with the dumbing-down effect of everything non-raiding.
The two groups don’t co-exist very well, and frankly, I’m not sure the time-crunched group is really suited for MMOs – at least not as I like to remember them (FFXI vet). However, because the time-crunched group has committed to leveling a character to cap, and was able to do so casually, their expectation is they should be able to continue doing so at cap. Is that wrong? I don’t think so. It’s just not the expectation the free-timers have of the game. That’s not wrong on their part, either. It’s a bit of a mess, but business is always going to side with the money; and the masses are very clearly more casual-oriented.
@Drew – Agreed. It’s just upsetting to see people get up in arms when some large game that has clearly set out expectations to appeal to mass market should somehow cater to what has been proven multiple times to be a minority. Rift’s multiple class, switch whenever you want, artifact hunting meta game features are all indicative that they got the message. SW is clearly not focused on the hardcore with a max group size of 8.
What does suck is that WoW started as a mirror to EQ and the raiding scene became the only thing to do at 50. It pulled in players from all over and over the years (WotLK specifically) has migrated from that model. Cataclysm tried to pull them back in and quite clearly, that venture failed miserably. WoW isn’t dead but Blizzard has had enough of the hardcore raiding with it’s poor ROI and is moving towards a more casual approach, as they should as a business.
“I’m tired of this “things are too easy now” talk. If you ever played UO or EQ then that was the definition on easy mode. Nearly every fight was simply a tank and spank zerg fest. Even WoW had a group of 40 clerics kill onyxia when it was cutting edge content. The hard part was running against a wall of death for 6 hours a night.”
Uh, no. You’re only considering one part of the game. But remember, you had to GET to that part of the game FIRST. If you think EQ was “easy mode”, you didn’t play it in 99/2000/2001. In these games nowadays, you can go from newbie zone to max level in HOURS whereas previous games required MONTHS. You can’t judge a game’s overall difficulty based on ONE aspect of it. That’s like judging the quality of a car by the rims or tires on it.
Though this is probably the first time I’ve ever heard EQ described as “easy mode”. Most MMO players today would quit within a week of playing even the time-limited progression servers (which still offer some luxuries that didn’t exist in real EQ circa 99/2k/2k1).
I completely agree with Drew though. As a “free timer”, I don’t like how MMOs are turning into the gaming equivalent of child’s play (“get to max level before your 7-day trial is up!”) but as a capitalist, I understand why. Casual types use less resources (bandwidth for one, since they don’t log in/play nearly as often as folks like me) and tend to come in MUCH larger numbers so that’s definitely win/win. There’s little danger of the casual set consuming an entire expansion’s content in a week and then vocally bashing the lack of depth of said expansion. But the primary reason I maintain multiple accounts in multiple games (EQ1, EVE, LOTRO, Champions, Rift, AoC, DCUO, CoH, STO, and several freemium titles), I’d love for at least one game to break from the trend so I could commit to one game. It would save me tons too!