MCV has an interesting article called, “Is the Core Still Important?” It is interesting to watch how the disruption terminology has been so mangled and twisted. When companies following disruption, of Christensen’s findings, in the tech industry, companies began to label every new product as ‘disruptive’. They really mangled the ‘disruption’ to mean ‘change’ or ‘innovation’. I wondered how smart business executives could screw up words and meanings so much. But then, before our very eyes, we have watched this occur in the gaming industry.
This is the series of events:
Christensen’s disruption series of books refers to the old traditional market as the Core Market. The new market is the Expanded Market. The pattern is that the Expanded Market begins with crummy products for crummy customers. All the profit and prestige is on the Core Market. But the Expanded Market moves upmarket. The Core Market often retreats and eventually it gets stuck in a corner. So it is turned into a niche or completely cannibalized.
An example of this would be mainframe computers from DEC as a Core Market. The PC was an Expanded Market. The mainframe makers never saw the PC as a threat. And mainframe markets was where all the money was. There was no market for PCs. At least, not at first.
Nintendo executives learn the disruption terminology and remade the company as a disruptive corporation. New teams are made. New vice presidents are brought in. Offices are moved. Nintendo executives refer to a ‘Core Market’, meaning their traditional games, and the ‘Expanded Market’, meaning their new untraditional games.
Forum jockeys, who despise the expanded market games, label them non-games and then eventually casual games. The traditional games they label as ‘hardcore games’ as they percieve themselves as hardcore.
Game journalists, who look at gaming message forum topics as an editor of which stories to pursue and focus on for the ‘gaming community’, adopt the memes of ‘casual games’ and ‘hardcore games’. The disruption terminology of expanded market and core market are forever gone. All that is left is ‘casual’ and ‘hardcore’.
Then it feeds back into the game forums where they begin to distort the terms even more. Since they proclaim themselves ‘hardcore’, they define every game they like as ‘hardcore’ even if it isn’t a core market game. They label New Super Mario Brothers and Mega Man 9 as ‘hardcore’ titles when they really are expanded market games (Both games employ value innovation to get back to the basics). Game journalists begin running with these distortions even more and then it bleeds into the game industry itself.
Probably the greatest distortion of the language is that the percieved definitions of ‘hardcore’ and ‘casual’ refer to customers or demographic groups. The marketers run away with this because they can only think in ‘demographics’ anyway. But the original disruption terminology, which Nintendo still uses in its exact way, Core Market and Expanded Market refer to the processes, not customers. The Core Market of mainframe computers and the expanded market of personal computers is not the difference of demographics but of the jobs the products perform.
Is the Core Market of Newspapers and the Expanded Market of Internet News the difference of demographics? No! While it is true that only old people still read newspapers while all the younger people use the Internet for news, these demographics are the consequence of different processes, not the cause of them.
Anyway, so with the core and expanded terms so mangled and distorted, it is fun to watch these billion dollar enterprises make multi-million dollar decisions that will affect their companies and all the employees that work there based entirely on these distortions. Let’s look at the MCV article.
For instance, what have been the big games to date in 2008? Wii Fit, certainly, is one of them. With over five million sales to date Nintendo’s title has been a massive success. But in unit terms it’s dwarfed by Rockstar’s Grand Theft Auto IV, which is approaching the 6.5 million sales barrier. The number of firms willing to plough millions into a hardcore title is less than once was, for sure, but those who do so often reap huge rewards.
Good job, MCV! You just compared the most popular game of last generation with the largest installed base (meaning of dedicated fans) to a game with no such fan base. You just compared a game with a budget of $100 million, the largest ever, to a far cheaper bathroom scale game. Even worse, due to the hardware, Wii Fit is constantly supply restrained. And it costs more. And is exclusive to only one platform. The fact that the sales numbers are near one another should be damning.
But we have a fun quote from Sony:
A spokesperson for Sony explaines to MCV why core gamers are hugely important to its brand:
“So called ‘hardcore’ gaming will always be important as sterotypically this type of gamer is the person who buys the products and evangelises them to their core and non-core friends. I think the core will continue to be our heartland, but as commercial entities I think publishers will go where the biggest viable group is.”
Their heartland? Does this not sound like political language? That is what a political campaigner would say. But the real point is that Sony sees the Core as where all the money and prestige is. Of course, that is why companies fall to disruptors all the time. Do you think editors and reporters from newspapers and television thought of the Internet very highly? No. They mocked it. They thought it was dumb. And now those editors and reporters are being fired left and right as their Core Market implodes from underneath them.Nintendo felt the wrath of the hardcore like no other following this year’s E3 presentation.The ‘wrath of the Hardcore’? Hah! Hardcore think *they* control the games industry.
A Nintendo spokesperson tells MCV: “We have never neglected our core gamers nor has Nintendo ever lost its passion for core gamers. We still have developers working on popular core gaming franchises but we need longer to complete these games – approximately two to three years. These games are not ready to launch in early 2009 but are being worked on by all development teams. Wario Land Shake Dimension, a true return to the classic 2D platform adventure, will be available for Wii in September of this year.”
Note how the Nintendo spokesperson doesn’t use the word ‘hardcore’ but the word ‘core’. Core is the correct meaning. And the way how the spokesperson is using it is doing so correctly. Core means a process, not a type of customer. And the process to make these core titles does take longer. (Instead of trying to understand how Nintendo is using their words, the hardcore say how Nintendo doesn’t ‘get it’. “We don’t want more Zelda and Mario games! We want new IPs!” they snivel and whine. But the hardcore are the ones responsible for distorting the terminology in the first place.)
It’s also fair to argue that the distinctions between hardcore and casual are no longer as clear as they once were. Our Sony friend adds: “I think we have seen over the years that the ‘core’ and ‘casual’ gamer groups are not mutually exclusive. A Nintendo spokesperson tells MCV: “We have never neglected our core gamers nor has Nintendo ever lost its passion for core gamers. We still have developers working on popular core gaming franchises but we need longer to complete these games – approximately two to three years. These games are not ready to launch in early 2009 but are being worked on by all development teams. Wario Land Shake Dimension, a true return to the classic 2D platform adventure, will be available for Wii in September of this year.”
Note how the Nintendo spokesperson doesn’t use the word ‘hardcore’ but the word ‘core’. Core is the correct meaning. And the way how the spokesperson is using it is doing so correctly. Core means a process, not a type of customer. And the process to make these core titles does take longer. (Instead of trying to understand how Nintendo is using their words, the hardcore say how Nintendo doesn’t ‘get it’. “We don’t want more Zelda and Mario games! We want new IPs!” they snivel and whine. But the hardcore are the ones responsible for distorting the terminology in the first place.)
It’s also fair to argue that the distinctions between hardcore and casual are no longer as clear as they once were. Our Sony friend adds: “I think we have seen over the years that the ‘core’ and ‘casual’ gamer groups are not mutually exclusive.
This is presented as if it is a ‘Big Discovery’. I expect a dozen articles on the subject, nonetheless. Core and Expanded never referred to customers. But they are lost in the distorted terms of hardcore and casual that they actually think that a person can enjoy both types of products is noteworthy.
Nintendo’s DS is inundated with top quality Japanense RPGs, such as Square Enix’s recently released Dragon Quest: Chapters of the Chosen, that until now have never been released in Europe. And who’d have thought that classic and unforgivingly hardcore titles such as Rez, Ikaruga and Every Extend Extra would be topping Microsoft’s Xbox Live Arcade bill?
This is the distortion that if the hardcore likes a certain type of gaming, then it must be hardcore. Nope. All the handheld RPGs are likely in the Expanded Market. They are all designed around faster and more pick up and play than before. Final Fantasy 3 did sell to new users who bought a DS just for Nintendogs and Brain Training.I’m not as familiar with Rex and Every Extend Extra, but Ikaruga is an arcade game, which means pick-up-and-play, which means little time invested, which means it probably fits closer into the expanded market. Besides, everyone knows Ikaruga was seen as a final act of old school gaming. There is a reason why games like Gradius, which the hardcore probably want to declare is a hardcore title, is being remade for WiiWare and intended to sell to new audiences.
If we are going to use stereotypes, let us use better ones. If a game is arcade like or is pick up and play, it goes into the Expanded Market. If the game is cinematic or focuses heavily graphics, it goes into the Core Market.
Neither of these facts would today be true had the casual revolution not paved the way to the larger market we enjoy today. So chin up, people – there’s enough room at the party for everyone. There is certainly not enough room for newspapers and television news anymore. The Internet news is devouring it alive as reporters lose their jobs left and right from the Core Market. The makers of the old mainframes are all gone except for IBM who switched to PCs. More recently, the PC gaming companies switched to consoles as much of PC gaming is being gored by online gaming and/or flash games while the consoles are a great dongle to make sure the software isn’t pirated.
This cycle has a pattern of showing that the conventional wisdom is consistently wrong. No one is asking what if the Expanded Market devours the Core as the hardcore fear? After all, that IS the path as illustrated by Christensen and his disruption. The entire act of the Expanded Market absorbing the Core Market is what ‘disruption’ refers to in the first place!