hardcoregamer
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Wii to be the death of the hardcore gamer?
Tyler Bleszinski, the brother of Cliffy B. (he made some game about some gears and war or something), isn't all that jazzed about the direction the Wii is taking the industry. He feels that the Wii's success could cause the eradication of the "hardcore gamer." Of course, we aren't inclined to agree.Sure, maybe the success of the Wii would make the young male "hardcore gamer" demographic smaller, but isn't the goal of expanding the market to include more overall better for the industry? Sure, things are fine the way they are, publishers are making money and all, but shouldn't we always be striving to improve? Nintendo is, and that's why we love them.We do agree with him about the need for less minigame compilations, though.[Via Go Nintendo]
Ultra gamers make up 22% of the market
An important aspect game publishers need to consider is their market. How many people are out there that buy games and of them, what are their buying habits? Jupiter Research, a market research company, has some answers. Ultra gamers, as Jupiter calls them, make up 22% of the game buying population. The ultra gamers are gamers that spend more than 5 hours per week playing games and more than $50 in the last six months buying them. This means the other 78% is the casual market. The ultra gamer tag (that would be most of the folks reading this) is certainly odd. We find $50 in six months to be a strangely low number, given the number of games many of us play in the course of a year; even the more economical GameFly subscription would run $132 in that period. Maybe the hardcore segment is a small portion of the ultra gamer segment.
