Sadly, its happening already. Look at the NPD sales charts. Wii this Wii that, Sims this Sims that. While truly fantastic core games and indie games only see sales through "core gamer havens" such as Steam.

I wish the film industry would stop being this way. Some truly great movies get fucked into a DVD only release while Paul Blart Mall Cop holds the top of the box office for a month straight :(

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@Kenny: I know it is, and I don't think there's any resisting it.

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As "core" gamers have quickly done this as well, we can expect that much like Hollywood, the rest of the gaming industry will cease caring about trying to please a bunch of whiny unpleasable jerks and just focus on making things for people that might actually *like* playing video games.

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Arguably, and this isn't a judgement here, its not even a game at all, and it's burning up the NPD with almost unprecedented numbers for a third party title.

Sign o' the times.

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I have, however, during my 28 years on the planet, noticed that entertainment tailored for mass consumption does tend to be, well, dumbed down. Of course there are always exceptions.

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Also, I haven't really looked into it, but I wouldn't call the Sims dumbed down. And the Wii Play / Wii Fit stuff isn't entirely dumbed down either.

I think the biggest difference between film and gaming is that film critics are generally receptive to all fare and can grade accordingly. The fact that movies are much shorter also means that film critics can see more films in a shorter amount of time, and can see all kinds of genres very easily. I trust that Ebert and other film reviewers can grade both Paul Blart and something like Frozen River easily because they have so much experience seeing all genres.

Gaming can take anywhere between 5 and 80+ hours for a game, making it much more difficult to see everything, and depending on the difficulty level, some critics are much more suited to certain genres than others. With the focus on gaming being so much towards the traditional, I feel like reviewers are so unaccustomed to something that isn't traditional that they rate these games with the same criteria in mind that they do for traditional games, and they end up way off base because of it. Wii Sports has a Metacritic rating of 76. Wii Play has a rating of 58. These are just terribly wrong, and the games deserve much better ratings than that.

Gaming criticism and "journalism" still has a looooong way to go.

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Good example of this would be Halo. It's a fun, excitement filled experience. Tons of people enjoy it, and it gets generally good reviews from critics. However, the "harder core" gamers still give it the thumb down, due to its more light-hearted approach to the sci-fi FPS genre.

I think the same applies to the movie industry. Look at Iron Man. Critics loved it, fans loved it, lots of people loved it...with the exception of some of the "harder core" movie watchers out there, who hate everything that isn't a dramatic, heart wrenching indie film.

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Then you have the hybrid gamers. What about a professionally competitive FPS player who enjoys Mario Kart? Or a hardcore RPG player who enjoys playing Uno on the 360? Or someone who plays Bejeweled five hours each night and occasionally dabbles in Halo?

I don't get people who bash casual gaming (I'm not saying you are here, you're not, but just bear with me.) The absolute number of games appealing to the traditional "hardcore" player has gone up. The number of people employed making "hardcore" games has ballooned from five years ago, even after the recent layoffs, if only due to the increased manpower and technological complexity of the newest generation of platforms. Yes, the number of casual games has gone up at a quicker rate, but this is only a response to the increasing accessibility of gaming bringing in more casual gamers. It would be completely idiotic to refuse to service this market.

Casual games are already experiencing their own mini-crash. At first, games were just rushed to market because no one else was servicing that demographic. Quality often took a backseat to time to market. Now, that particular mindset is suffering backlash and companies are spending more time and money to produce higher-quality offerings. We should be cheering this! Better games is good for the industry! The industry has learned from the ET days. They've realized that, as a market matures, it will experience a flight to quality.

This has happened in the traditional hardcore games as well. Five years ago, with the success of GTA, all it took was the mere mention of "sandbox" to get people's engines going. What happened? A bunch of crappy sandbox games came out. They weren't particularly good, some of them downright sucked, but they sold. Now, open-world games are held to a higher standard of quality. Where once the prospect of free-roaming was enough, we now demand day/night cycles, fully-destructible & traversible environments, dynamic economies, online interconnectivity, etc. As a particular portion experienced a glut of subpar games, differentiation and innovation evolved from just a selling point to a necessity for stay alive.

I have full faith this will happen to "casual" games, and I welcome it. If I only have 30 minutes to play a game of Catan, then I want that game to be the absolute highest quality it can be. I want my (currently imaginary) girlfriend to tone up that sweet ass with some really sweaty power yoga. I want my niece to play with the cutest goddamned virtual dogz on the market.

As for your fears of "hardcore" gamers being marginalized, it's here. "Core" and "Hardcore" used to be synonymous, but no longer. Strictly speaking from sales figures, the landscape of games targeting the "hardcore" gamer demographic is largely saturated, whereas the "casual" market is mostly untapped. The potential size of the casual market also greatly exceeds the hardcore. Put simply, it's cheaper and more profitable to sell to a less-picky demographic.

But don't fret too much. With the advent of digital distribution and lower barriers to entry, we'll get high-quality independent games in addition to accessible games with enough depth to satisfy the hardcore gamer in us. Plus, cream rises to the top. There will always be a place for the Criteron collection. We'll have to pick out our Kurasawas from our Bays, but I've always been happy for choice.

Plus, sometimes I don't want to interpret anything, I just wanna blow shit up.

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Many of the famous franchises the started on a nintendo console are now allied with the PS360.

Final Fantasy(NES)-> Final Fantasy XIII(PS360)

Street Fighter 2(SNES)-> Street Fighter 4(PS360)

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Also, I feel weird crediting SF2 to the SNES when that felt like an inferior port of the arcade game.

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If I had to guess the outlier for the last few gens, I'd have to guess the Gamecube, just because there are so few games for it that the quality will skew it more than with the others.

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...SPOILED!

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No, there aren't. I killed them all. Check my gamerscore.

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The demo was genuinely fun and the reason I sought this game out...even when it had been out for a year by the time I got my 360.

While I was talking with the clerk (this is at GameStop) he was telling me stories about the complaints he was getting from "fratboy types" that tried to sell the game back after the Halo 3 beta "ended" and realized that they couldn't get squat because of all the OTHER people trying the same thing.

But I bought it used, and I still go back to it every once in a while for some good clean violent fun.

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Do you want to play again?

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Motherfucker.

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I'm waiting for the anti-aircraft crew.

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My point still stands though.

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