Current Events > Why do hardcore gamers hate casuals so much?

(+) Yeah! (+)

casual games are fun

Hardcore people dislike casuals because the existence of casuals has altered the gaming market substantially.

Back in the old days, most games were made for hardcore gamers. Massive RPGs, high APM RTS, brutal side scrollers, etc.

Now, though, the main audience is mainstream casuals who don't want games to be incredibly hard or excessively complicated.

This means hardcore gamers have fewer new games per year to suit their style. That's the main problem they have.

Gobstoppers12 posted...

Hardcore people dislike casuals because the existence of casuals has altered the gaming market substantially.

Back in the old days, most games were made for hardcore gamers. Massive RPGs, high APM RTS, brutal side scrollers, etc.

Now, though, the main audience is mainstream casuals who don't want games to be incredibly hard or excessively complicated.

This means hardcore gamers have fewer new games per year to suit their style. That's the main problem they have.

I don't think this part is actually true. The games market is bigger than ever, and you can easily go and find brutally difficult games if you want to.

What is true is that so many of the big franchises we grew up with have been watered down for a casual audience as they grew in popularity. Elder Scrolls is probably the most cynical example.

Only because casuals can flood non-casual games/genres and chanclge them through sheer bitching.

Casuals subsidise hardcore gamers. Current development budgets would not be sustainable without them.

Hardcore gamers hate that, and the concessions made to them.

ai123 posted...

Casuals subsidise hardcore gamers. Current development budgets would not be sustainable without them.

Hardcore gamers hate that, and the concessions made to them.

Hardcore games existed before casuals entered the market. Hardcore games WERE the market, originally.

I'm pretty sure the main complaint is historically hardcore series getting fundamental changes to appeal to a wider audience, one that seems to either complain anyway or not buy the game regardless.

casuals bought the horse armour DLC, pre-ordered shitty bugfests for $250 (excluding the day 1 dlc) and ruined the gaming ecosystem

Rika_Furude posted...

casuals bought the horse armour DLC, pre-ordered shitty bugfests for $250 (excluding the day 1 dlc) and ruined the gaming ecosystem

I find that hardcore gamers tend to be way more likely to spend money on skins and pre-orders. The stuff is marketed at them because they're willing to spend more. Casual gamers want to spend their money on other hobbies and entertainment.

I also find it funny how the gatekeeping gamers like to say "casuals" as a noun. It really feels like they're trying to use it as a slur sometimes. That, and they don't want to say "casual gamers" because they don't consider them "real gamers."

pretzelcoatl posted...

Hardcore games existed before casuals entered the market. Hardcore games WERE the market, originally.

I'm pretty sure the main complaint is historically hardcore series getting fundamental changes to appeal to a wider audience, one that seems to either complain anyway or not buy the game regardless.

The hardcore gamer market would have remained too small to sustain today's development costs.

I guess I'm...neither? I'm certainly a veteran with over 20 years of gaming under my belt and I play many different games, ranging from approachable series like Pokemon to demanding ones like Elden Ring.

And my silly behind tried to put both together by making a Gym Leader Clair cosplay in Elden Ring.

DementedDurian posted...

And my silly behind tried to put both together by making a Gym Leader Clair cosplay in Elden Ring.

Got a screenshot to share?

They see casuals as people who do not take the lifestyle seriously. I say lifestyle, because that's how they see it, not for the hobby it is.

ai123 posted...

The hardcore gamer market would have remained too small to sustain today's development costs.

Today's dev costs are ridiculous and should never have approached these levels. I blame casuals.

pinky0926 posted...

I don't think this part is actually true. The games market is bigger than ever, and you can easily go and find brutally difficult games if you want to.

What is true is that so many of the big franchises we grew up with have been watered down for a casual audience as they grew in popularity. Elder Scrolls is probably the most cynical example.

I started with morrowind but I still prefer skyrim.

Don't get it twisted though there are some aspects or morrowind I wish remained. Like you could mix match armor better as they had more seperate pieces. But I never wanna go back to my weapon clearly going through a enemy but I "missed" cause stats.

It's been my experience ever ES game makes some improvements in some areas while being worse in others.

ai123 posted...

The hardcore gamer market would have remained too small to sustain today's development costs.

The current development costs are completely unnecessary and I don't buy that they're what's holding gaming back.

What's holding gaming back is the realization that you can gate things behind microtransactions and people will still play your (slot machine) game.

Why do hardcore gamers hate casuals so much?

Insecurity

Giacomo_Hawkins posted...

Got a screenshot to share?

No.

action52 posted...

I also find it funny how the gatekeeping gamers like to say "casuals" as a noun. It really feels like they're trying to use it as a slur sometimes. That, and they don't want to say "casual gamers" because they don't consider them "real gamers."

I somewhat blame the media for that.

I have some potted plants at home, yet I would not say gardening is my hobby or I'm a gardener.

Yet when some gaming study comes up once more, everyone who plays 1 hour a week on their phone while waiting on a bus gets called a gamer.

Yet these people would probably never calling themselves like that, nor would they name "gaming" when asked "What are your hobbies?".

Sure, there is also some toxity from the eager "play to win" types, but I think most "that's not a real gamer" argument is about some abstract 3rd person, and rarely about someone specific and towards their face.

Sufferedphoenix posted...

I started with morrowind but I still prefer skyrim.

Don't get it twisted though there are some aspects or morrowind I wish remained. Like you could mix match armor better as they had more seperate pieces. But I never wanna go back to my weapon clearly going through a enemy but I "missed" cause stats.

It's been my experience ever ES game makes some improvements in some areas while being worse in others.

Some scaling issues aside, I think Oblivion struck the balance well.

Modded oblivion was the perfect RPG experience for me. Felt I was truly immersed in an adventure.

ELL OH ELL at this notion that the market used to be tailored to "hardcore" gamers.

I've been playing videogames since my family got an Intellivision in 1981. There have been casual games for nearly 50 years.

Do you people forget the Nintendo exists?

pinky0926 posted...

Some scaling issues aside, I think Oblivion struck the balance well.

Modded oblivion was the perfect RPG experience for me. Felt I was truly immersed in an adventure.

Oblivion was great for its time. But it's ugly as fuck now. Somehow imo morrowind looks better

Euripides posted...

ELL OH ELL at this notion that the market used to be tailored to "hardcore" gamers.

I've been playing videogames since my family got an Intellivision in 1981. There have been casual games for nearly 50 years.

Do you people forget the Nintendo exists?

Nintendo had some hard as fuck games too. Megamall series ninja Gaiden battle toads

Sufferedphoenix posted...

Nintendo had some hard as fuck games too. Megamall series ninja Gaiden battle toads

Sure, but to say that "Back in the old days, most games were made for hardcore gamers" is just patently false

Euripides posted...

Sure, but to say that "Back in the old days, most games were made for hardcore gamers" is just patently false

I feel while what you are saying is true there definitely was a higher percentage of harder games.

But come around snes era and I feel part of that was several games started as a arcade game which was designed to eat your quarters. Fighters and beat em ups in particular. They may have toned the difficulty down for some console ports but still it replaced infinite lives via paying for a new one with a strict life limit.

pinky0926 posted...

I don't think this part is actually true. The games market is bigger than ever, and you can easily go and find brutally difficult games if you want to.

It's definitely true regarding large studio projects. Look back at the old days of MMO development for another example. XP and Gear loss on death used to be the norm. Ever since WoW came out and got mainstream popular, those functions have all but disappeared. For the better, if you ask me, but hardcore people liked there to be 'consequences' for playing poorly.

Even within WoW, which was already casual compared to MMOs of its day, the difference between the initial release (classic) and the current game is insane. It skews way more casual in the modern game. Faster leveling, easier leveling, easier gearing, barely any travel time, etc.

Is hardcore gamer vs casual gamer really a question of game difficulty

I always thought of it more as level of seriousness towards gaming as an activity. Casual gamers play games in their spare time, hardcore gamers create time to play games in

Euripides posted...

ELL OH ELL at this notion that the market used to be tailored to "hardcore" gamers.

I've been playing videogames since my family got an Intellivision in 1981. There have been casual games for nearly 50 years.

Do you people forget the Nintendo exists?

It literally was. Games were expensive, so to have their customers get the most playtime out of a game, they tended to be difficult.

Euripides posted...

Sure, but to say that "Back in the old days, most games were made for hardcore gamers" is just patently false

It's patently not.

Before the SNES, games were deliberately made obscenely hard. It was a deliberate design choice to artificially prolong playtime, because memory restrictions meant the games had to be smaller. Ao, you make the small game difficult to make sure the customer gets their dollar per hour money's worth.

And even on the SNES, it took a while for game deaign to catch up with the improved tech.

Games on average were absolutely harder. Of course that's not a universal rule; Elmo's Number World was only ever gonna be what it was. But on average, games were absolutely harder.

Gobstoppers12 posted...

This means hardcore gamers have fewer new games per year to suit their style. That's the main problem they have.

I dunno what planet you live on but Dark Souls has become its own damn genre in the last decade or so here on Earth.

kirbymuncher posted...

Is hardcore gamer vs casual gamer really a question of game difficulty

I always thought of it more as level of seriousness towards gaming as an activity. Casual gamers play games in their spare time, hardcore gamers create time to play games in

It's definitely this for me.
Gobstoppers12 posted...

It's definitely true regarding large studio projects. Look back at the old days of MMO development for another example. XP and Gear loss on death used to be the norm. Ever since WoW came out and got mainstream popular, those functions have all but disappeared. For the better, if you ask me, but hardcore people liked there to be 'consequences' for playing poorly.

Even within WoW, which was already casual compared to MMOs of its day, the difference between the initial release (classic) and the current game is insane. It skews way more casual in the modern game. Faster leveling, easier leveling, easier gearing, barely any travel time, etc.

I don't think changes like that are because of "casual" gamers though. A lot of that was just tedious for the sake of being tedious. Removing it made the games less of a hassle to play.

Like back in the old days of MapleStory, when you died, you lost 5% of your exp bar. And at higher levels, it started to take 1 hour to get 2-3% of that bar. So dying once could cause you to lose 2+ hours of progress. For a game that was already insanely grindy, mechanics like that just weren't respecting your time.

And has been said already, old games were hard because they were trying to mask how short they were. Gaming didn't suddenly get easier because of "casuals" developers just stopped needing to hide lack of content with difficulty.

It's same energy as getting mad that someone who listens to mainstream music considers themselves a music listener.

Back in the old days, most games were made for hardcore gamers. Massive RPGs, high APM RTS, brutal side scrollers, etc.

I've been playing video games since the "old days", and this is total horseshit. There have always been certain devs who sought to make niche games for niche audiences, but the vast majority of games have always been made to be accessible by as wide an audience (primarily young people) as possible.

Broadly, gaming has always been a casual form of entertainment. Just because some jackasses insisted they were just for nerds or kids doesn't make it some "hardcore" form of media that's been inexplicably infiltrated by a mass market and casual hobbyists.

I don't

pretzelcoatl posted...

Hardcore games existed before casuals entered the market. Hardcore games WERE the market, originally.

Going back to the arcade era of the early 80's, the casual gamer existed WAY before anyone became a hardcore gamer. Games were hard, but they were hard on purpose. To eat quarters. That's why most early NES games were just repetitive arcade ports where the only thing that really changed was how difficult each board got.

Was there a shift in 2nd generation (assuming that's what we consider SNES and Genesis) consoles? Maybe. But hardcore gamers were always the minority.

I've got a lot of reasons, mostly due to lack of self-awareness (or even their defiance when confronted about the things that they're saying).

Gobstoppers12 posted...

Hardcore people dislike casuals because the existence of casuals has altered the gaming market substantially.

Back in the old days, most games were made for hardcore gamers. Massive RPGs, high APM RTS, brutal side scrollers, etc.

Now, though, the main audience is mainstream casuals who don't want games to be incredibly hard or excessively complicated.

This means hardcore gamers have fewer new games per year to suit their style. That's the main problem they have.

Far more games are made then ever.

A smaller % of all games may be hardcore but the number is higher then ever.

bigblu89 posted...

Was there a shift in 2nd generation (assuming that's what we consider SNES and Genesis)

4th.

First was whatever the hell a Magnavox Odyssey was. Second was 2600. Third was NES.

"Hardcore gamer" is just such a ridiculous concept tbh. It's like Joel Hodgson's "Extreme Rice" skit but with no self-awareness.

You're making pixels on a screen change, dude. Sure, it's fun. Sure, it can be deep and complex. But there's nothing "hardcore" about it, lol.

Because sometimes casuals bring down the quality and it's up to the gatekeepers jocks to keep those casual nerds in check.

It's just another version of gatekeeping.

Prestoff posted...

It's just another version of gatekeeping.

Maybe it is but wouldn't the idea be to get people to not try to buck the trend with their untempered views on a subject?

Someone being narked upon hearing Unreal's graphics be called "ugly" by a person who only got into gaming in 2015 is perfectly fair, I think. What the hell do they know? Even I admit they didn't exactly age gracefully and the impressiveness of them is lost on me in the here and now but I would never begrudge a game of the era for my modern sensibilities.

008Zulu posted...

They see casuals as people who do not take the lifestyle seriously. I say lifestyle, because that's how they see it, not for the hobby it is.

This.

A lot of hardcore gamers have made being a capital G "Gamer" their entire personality. Casual gamers remind them that gaming isn't all that niche nowadays and that they're not all that special just for playing video games.

That's why a lot of them have become elitists about the types of games they play now. Or how we had that whole "PC Master Race" bullshit before everyone and their mother started getting into PC gaming. They're like nerdier hipsters.

Nothing against casuals, but some are just awful with their opinions. I once had an argument with a guy who thinks the iphone is a better gaming system than the DS cause the games are cheaper and he thinks they have "quality"

crayola555 posted...

Nothing against casuals, but some are just awful with their opinions. I once had an argument with a guy who thinks the iphone is a better gaming system than the DS cause the games are cheaper and he thinks they have "quality"

Well in all fairness that last point is kind of ambiguous. If he can give thoughtful and considered reasons as to why that's not an invalid thing to say.

But if it's just "I had more fun," and can't explain what actual value he took away from the experience then, yeah, screw that noise.

RchHomieQuanChi posted...

This.

A lot of hardcore gamers have made being a capital G "Gamer" their entire personality. Casual gamers remind them that gaming isn't all that niche nowadays and that they're not all that special just for playing video games.

That's why a lot of them have become elitists about the types of games they play now. Or how we had that whole "PC Master Race" bullshit before everyone and their mother started getting into PC gaming. They're like nerdier hipsters.

I think that hipster comparison is spot on. They were into gaming before it was cool and now try to gatekeep who's a "real" gamer.

Solid_Sonic posted...

Maybe it is but wouldn't the idea be to get people to not try to buck the trend with their untempered views on a subject?

Someone hearing Unreal's graphics be called "ugly" by a person who only got into gaming in 2015 is perfectly fair, I think. What the hell do they know? Even I admit they didn't exactly age gracefully and the impressiveness of them is lost on me in the here and now but I would never begrudge a game of the era for my modern sensibilities.

I mean, it's a fact of life that casuals will have misinformed opinions on things they're not passionate about, but ultimately they are the main ones funding the games and series we enjoy.

It's a holdover from old school exclusive "gaming as an identity and refuge" culture. Gaming as these gamers thought of it used to be a maligned but safe space where they could show their skill and devotion without interference from outsiders. But gaming got so popular that countless others joined and they feel they've been made a minority in their own land. That has bred resentment because the new people are being catered to despite not understanding "the rules", they don't exhibit the skillz, their interests and values are often different.

We see the same dynamic for anything that used to be a closed boys club for middle class, socially marginal nerds. PC Building, Anime, Tabletop Gaming, etc.

Prestoff posted...

It's just another version of gatekeeping.

a certain amount of gatekeeping is good, actually