Quote Originally Posted by Greg2600 View Post
Gamestop didn't get that large by casual gamers. Whether it's a 10 year old kid or a 30 year old, if you play several hours a week or more, you're hardcore. Casual gamers are people who like playing simplistic facebook games or Solitaire. They never shopped much at Gamestop. Digital media won't work unless it's client-server, where you don't have to download a ton of data. I could be wrong, but I don't think you can get the performance/graphics of the current games in that scenario.
Exactly. I don't know many "casual" gamers who game on anything other than an iOS/Android device or a PC. They game because a device they use happens to have gaming capabilities - they don't go out and buy devices that are dedicated to gaming, and they generally don't custom build their PC with gaming in mind. I don't know any casual gamers (and by casual, I mean the Angry Birds/solitaire-playing types of people, not casual as in "I don't have a lot of time to play") who go out and buy anything like a 3DS or Vita or a console of any kind.

I've been down this road with the "casual" gamer distinction in World of Warcraft. Casual gets applied to people who don't have a lot of time to spend on the game, implying they're just inherently worse than other gamers or don't have their priorities straight when it comes to their hobbies. I think that's an incorrect application of the term. I believe the term casual should be applied more to gamers who don't really invest (time-wise or monetarily) in games the same way almost anyone posting on this forum does. Heck, even though I cited Angry Birds above, I have the 360 version, and I've probably put about 30-40 hours into it already. That's considerably more time than anyone who downloads it to their iPhone and fiddles around with it while they're waiting to pick their kid up from school or on the commute to work, etc.

Can anyone here honestly say that they've shifted their gaming from consoles and handhelds to their phone now that smartphones are so prevalent? I'd find that hard to believe. What's happened instead is that the gaming industry has picked up an entirely new group of players that was sort of left out before. I guess the only scenario I can see someone viably saying that is if they shun all modern consoles and play a lot of older emulator type stuff. That's not to say there's no overlap between those groups - I play games on my daughter's iPod when I'm bored and she's not using it too - but I'd never consider it a replacement for the 3DS or 360 or Wii U or even my older consoles.