In the Toyetic thread yesterday, Abalieno said this:

[B]eware when you say that there’s space for a casual MMO, you are also aiming to casual subscribers.

This is, interestingly, very wrong, but most game observers wouldn’t realize this. That’s because ‘casual’ and ‘hardcore’ are the most misused words in the game industry. In fact, I misused it in my own comments.

The Sims is touted as a casual game, and one that attracted a casual audience. And perhaps many people in that audience were casual. But I know many can attest to the fact that there was a very, very hardcore sims audience, and it wasn’t who you would suspect. Many games industry professionals can tell you tales of going home to find girlfriends and wives unwilling to give up the computer because a new Sims expansion came out. The Sims has huge communities dedicated to building furniture, wallpaper, plants and anything else you can think of. The Sims storytelling site, made up of stories submitted by the fans, has a ridiculous number of tales to tell – enough so that finding the good ones is kind of a problem.

Clearly, the Sims has a very hardcore segment of their fanbase. The wrinkle is that that hardcore fanbase is not what our marketing people think of when they say ‘hardcore’ – they’re thinking about the guys who buy $400 video cards every time a new Doom comes out, or the guys who can beat you in Starcraft in 30 seconds flat. Surely, surely, your wife can’t be more hardcore than you. Can she?

She sure can, and this fact points to the fundamental failure of the words ‘hardcore’ and ‘casual’ when talking about game design. ‘Hardcore’ and ‘casual’ should be verbs that can be applied to any successful game genre. Even if you are a hardcore shooter or a hardcore MMO player, you may be a casual AI sim player while your wife is a hardcore AI sim player. To be successful in the market, a game – any game – must have both casual and hardcore gamers come to play. It must be double-coded.

You’ll see this pattern over and over again – there are plenty of people who just buy Wipeout 3 (casual racing sim players), and then those who pay 500 dollars for the custom steering wheel peripherals (the hardcore). There are plenty of people who have never gotten past level 20 in Everquest (casual MMOers), and those who do 3 Plane Raids a week (the hardcore). When talking about online games, marketing people like to bemoan how people are only playing casual games like poker. Anyone with ESPN knows that one of these ‘casual’ game players, Chris Moneymaker, left the internet Texas Hold’em rooms to beat the pros in the World Series of Poker – that’s hardcore.

All of this brings us back to the Sims. The interesting problem that the marketing people for the Sims had was that the market didn’t exist yet, and as such, hardcore AI sim players (i.e. wives and girlfriends) didn’t go shopping at CompUSA for their entertainment. They’re not the sort that reads game previews in PCGamer – hell, they’d probably skip it in Entertainment Weekly. How do you get these boxes into the hands of all those potential Sims addicts?

What EA did was brilliant. They sold it to technological early adopters (who were, ironically, usually hardcore players of other genres), and they sold it to us as a Trojan Horse. Go back and look at the marketing from before launch, and it says two things: Will Wright is a golden god, and his new AI experiment will walk on water and cure the lepers. A whole bunch of technophiles went and bought it on that promise, played it for a couple of days, and then we all said collectively, “Did I just pay $50 bucks to clean virtual toilets?” And just when we were ready to chuck the CD into the circular file, our girlfriends and wives said, “Um, could you hold onto that? I think I’d like to try it out.”

Under this scenario (which Will Wright has described at least once in a GDC talk), hardcore sims players didn’t pay money for their initial Sims box – but they’ve probably bought all of their expansions. Even more troubling to those trying to reach this market, one gets the sense that, other than Sims expansion packs, this audience still doesn’t spend money on gaming the way hardcore FPS players do. The latter will buy anything that says shooter on the box. The former still isn’t shopping in Best Buy or reading PC Gamer. She might know when a Sims expansion comes out, but will be leery about buying anything that hasn’t been vetted by either the hardcore Sims players, or their traditional hardcore, free-spending husbands.

Someday, someone is going to make a solid purely social MMO, fulfilling the promise of TSO. This game, whatever it is, is going to capture its market the same way the Sims did, by trojan-horsing in on the early adopters, and then building it’s own hardcore market. And the people who do it are going to be making their own money hats. Mark my words.