Study Reveals Casual / Core Gamers More Diverse Than Believed
A joint Big Fish / NPD research study was unveiled at Casual Connect 08 and in press releases earlier this week. Their findings reveal that commonly held wisdom about core and casual gamers are not necessarily supported by reality.

According to Paulette Trimmer of Big Fish Games, "The study is significant as it shows gamers can no longer be classified into the traditional archetypes of core and casual fans due to the rapid diversification of the demographics, game styles, business models and platforms in the U.S. games market." My personal opinion is that "can no longer" should be translated as, "never should have been." But that's me.

Further findings reveal a few interesting tidbits:

* The line between core and casual is blurry. There's more crossover than expected.

* Conventional wisdom previously held that gamers of either camp stuck with their favorite game genre. That doesn't hold either - while players definitely favor their preferred game style, there's a lot of crossover. Shockingly enough, core "action gamers" also demonstrated a preference for hidden object, word, and match-three games. This comes as a complete non-surprise to me, but I'm someone who has a broad range of gaming interests.

* The time commitments assumed by casual and core audiences have been miscalculated as well. Fans of certain casual game genres spend more time per week, on the average, than core action gamers. This also doesn't surprise me, as someone who has spent way too much time hooked on certain sim-style casual games.

You can check out more details of the study here.

The NPD Group will be publishing a report detailing the survey and its findings.

Labels: casual games, Mainstream Games

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 9:48 AM (Permalink)