Sales Are Up, But Is "Core" Gaming Doomed?

Raph Koster, the former lead designer for Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies, likes to ask big questions, like "Are single-player games doomed?" and "Will market expansion harm core gaming?" The answer to both questions is, of course and as you might have guessed, both a resounding "yes!" and an equally resounding "absolutely not."

So it's not that Koster's opinion piece, dubbed "An Uncertain Future For The Core Gamer?" over at Gamasutra, isn't interesting, but it gets a lot of its assumptions?I won't say wrong, but let's just say not persuasively right. Go read the original post as well if you like (the Gamasutra version's been "adapted") but in essence, he's simply saying that as the market grows, hardcore gamers look "niche-ier" and are worth less money, while casual gamers are worth increasingly more, and ne'er the twain shall meet in terms of publisher commitment and retail price parity.

In other words, D&D fans, you're the shiz-nit, but get used to paying more for your games, because it's going to cost companies more to create more complex games for an infinitely more fickle audience, and Casual Jane or Joe could give a shiz-nitzel about epic levels and ex-pee points and plus-or-minus operands plopped in front of integers employed to crudely represent the game of chance as relates to the game of nerds living a vicarious dice-driven fantasy life.

Well okay, point taken, but we've already seen how this is going to work, and it's called wargaming. What's a wargame? If you have to ask, and I suspect a lot of you do, then I've made my point. Despite that lack of public awareness, the wargaming market is alive and well and arguably producing some of its best material. Sure, it's in cardiac arrest as markets go compared to the sales and brand awareness of games like Guitar Hero III, but that's irrelevant to my point ? it's nonetheless managed to eek out a reasonably successful business despite remaining one of the least accessible genres in gaming.

Wargamers aren't a dying bunch. They're a niche bunch, but they didn't die, and they won't be dead in a decade or even a century. You can always count on a certain hyper-obsessive-compulsive segment of the gaming populace to care about the precise ballistic trajectory of a particular type of bullet in a specific type of magazine used in a particular type of gun fired by a particularly trained person in specific environmental circumstances under explicit psychological pressure (and so on). Combat porn? Well sure, but the point is that you may think that market went away a long time ago. It didn't. It won't. And while it'll never again be a booming segment of gaming-dom, well, I guess the point is that it never was in the first place. It just looked that way because the number of people with computers when wargaming was big was, you know, like a hundred or something.

The number of people using computers has obviously grown, but while you can't deny certain genres within gaming have modulated somewhat, no one talks about the way that escalating user-base was always destined to make those genres look even more niche by virtue of elementary relativity. Wargaming was a niche before computers existed. Computers briefly driven by Koster's "introverted core gamers" may indeed have appeared to momentarily wag the dog, but wargaming's never had its Wii Sports or Rock Band. The learning curve involved is by definition prohibitive. When video-gaming finds its ceiling, all the old-school core areas will simply look like they do in any other medium: appropriately, inevitably, enduringly niche.

Which brings me back to Koster's point about a rising tide forcing core gamers to pay more to enjoy their hobby. That's true if you assume more means "what they've always paid" compared to the lower prices associated with casual online or downloadable console content. But wargamers today, for all the ridiculous detail that goes into stuff like SSG's Decisive Battles series or AGEOD's Napoleon's Campaigns, are only paying a dollar for dollar premium if you assume progress equals "production value." Without question, wargames today cut conventional design corners and use fewer art assets while pouring resources into A.I. development and/or historical research and scenario design. But wargamers aren't paying literally more for new wargames. In fact they're oftentimes paying notably less, since they're usually purchasing their games online, direct download, print-your-own-manual, etc. Is $30-$40 for a wargame a price premium? I don't think so.

It's an important distinction I've not seen others make, i.e. that perhaps in the transition to "blockbuster gaming" as a succession of crowd-pleasing Roland Emmerich fare, we'll discover that the core audience cares a lot less about how "blockbuster" the next version of D&D whatever looks, and more about simple systemic fidelity and A.I. design and extensibility adjuncts like design tools that allow the community to broaden a game's vistas ? grass roots growth in lieu of formal sequels, in other words, without the messy studio production costs.

So while I half get what Koster is arguing here (just like I half got what he was saying when he argued games for introverts are ipso facto doomed) I think he places too much value on gaming's production metrics and too little value on the tenacity of by-niche-gamer-for-niche-gamer studios or groups of developers who'll never swallow the notion that mass attraction equals mass satisfaction. For every American Idol there's a Slings and Arrows, for every I Am Legend there's a La Vie en Rose or Persepolis. Someone's making those 5-10 minutes short films they're showing at Sundance (also currently available as cheap Xbox Live downloads). Someone's going to see Ang Lee's Lust, Caution and Cirstian Mungiu's 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days. All I'm saying is, don't be so quick to assume there's anything "uncertain" about the future of core gaming, anymore than there's anything uncertain about the ability of independent filmmakers to keep making films only 10 people care about. As a so-called "core" gamer, I could really care less what kind of sales BioShock has, because I know someone, somewhere, is going to make it regardless. The point was never to convince everyone to read Raymond Carver instead of John Grisham or William Faulkner instead of Scott Smith. But while they'll never be modern bestsellers, Carver and Faulkner aren't going anywhere, and neither is niche gaming. Wait and see.