<\/div>I have to be careful here to avoid having people accuse me of gatekeeping. I know the terms of “hardcore” and “casual” are badly defined and often misused. For the purposes of this discussion, we’re interested in people who buy dedicated gaming hardware and use it to play a lot of games. Yes, smartphone games are huge and they make a ton of money. Those gamers are lovely people I’m not saying their gaming is any less valid than mine, I’m just saying that their concerns are mostly orthogonal to the stuff I write about on this site. <\/p>\n
I’m sorry the nomenclature is so messed up, but I can’t fix it from where I’m sitting. Ideally we’d come up with a new word that properly communicates what we’re trying to say, but making up new terms is difficult and dangerous<\/a> business. If I draw a line and say that “dedicated gaming hardware” is our dividing line between groups A and B, then I’ll end up dragged into grey-area arguments. “What about this laptop, Shamus? It’s ten years old and only runs Minecraft! Is that really ‘dedicated gaming hardware’? Your nomenclature is bullshit!” If we make our dividing line based on hours spent playing, then you wind up with stupid situations where the “hardcore” gamer only plays Madden 201*<\/em> and Call of Duty<\/em> at launch and their console gathers dust for the rest of the year, while the supposedly “casual” gamer plays games on their cell phone and clocks thousands of hours of play annually. We run into similar problems if we try to sort people by money spent or favored game genres. <\/p>\n We can make AAA vs. indie games the dividing line, but then we wind up in a sub-argument about how you demarcate<\/em> those two ideas. Is the industry-shattering blockbuster Minecraft<\/em> really “indie”? Is Child of Light<\/em> really “AAA” because it was developed by publishing behemoth Ubisoft? What about smash hit Player Unknown’s Battlegrounds<\/em>? What about the TellTale games stuff? <\/p>\n This is annoying because we want to talk about gaming enthusiasts but we can’t because we end up dragged into side-arguments over definitions. Normally that would be fine. Nerds love to argue over definitions and that’s a perfectly valid way to waste your time. We can argue about what makes something a shooter, what games count as an RPG, or what comics qualify as “superhero” stories. That’s fine. The problem is that the argument over “hardcore” gamers drags us into these awful gatekeeping arguments that boil down to “You don’t play games the way I do, therefore you’re not a gamer and your games don’t matter.”<\/p>\n I’m kind of partial to “gaming enthusiast” rather than “hardcore gamer”, even though it conceptually suffers from all of the same problems. “What, are those people playing smartphone games just not enthusiastic<\/strong> enough for you Shamus?<\/em>“<\/p>\n I know “hardcore” is a stupid term because it implies one person is “more” of a gamer than another. That’s annoying, but I’m going to continue using the term “hardcore” for the rest of this article, only for lack of a better term. Just understand that “hardcore” should have half a dozen qualifying asterisks beside it.<\/p>\n Anyway. Let’s get on with it already…<\/p>\n For the last ten years I’ve been carrying around this idea that the PC was small and unimportant to the publishers and the consoles were what the likes of EA, Ubisoft, Activision, 2k Games, and Epic cared about. That was true ten years ago, but is it still true now?<\/p>\n I bring this up because I recently ran into this two year old article<\/a> linking to a six year old study<\/a> by the ESA<\/a> claiming that the PC dominates the market. You’ll find this information on page 7 of the study, where it says that frequent gamersI’m pretty sure “frequent” gamers is their dodge for getting around the “hardcore” problem I talked about above.<\/span> play on the following devices:<\/p>\n Obviously these percentages don’t add up to 100%. This makes sense, since lots of people play games on multiple platforms. <\/p>\n I get that “dedicated handheld” is talking about stuff like the Nintendo DS and PS Vita, but I can’t imagine what “wireless device” could be that isn’t included in smartphone or handheld categories. Wouldn’t a laptop be a wireless device? Technically, isn’t a Playstation 4 wireless these days? Heck, what devices aren’t<\/em> wireless at this point?<\/p>\n
<\/div>Market Share<\/h3>\n
<\/div>\n