Casual and Hardcore gamers and sales
Okay. It took me a couple weeks to get thru HALO. I had given up on WoW for a while because I was at a point where I had two choices: 1) spend 3-4 per sitting to find groups and then work on some quests, or 2) go online and find out what all the high level soloing quests are and do those.
It isn’t that I don’t like playing WoW for 3-4 hrs at a time; rather, I don’t have that time without giving up sleep or falling even further behind this semester. Query: Why do these academic organizations schedule conferences during the academic year? Answer: If you go to or present at every one available, you may never have to see your students? I’m feeling guilty myself for missing a day for MI Academy, and next week (the week after Spring Break, I’ll be gone for 4Cs). That means I will have had class 2/3 of the time, including the day before break started where 6 out 19 students came. Also, I’m taking 3 courses, teaching, and doing a slew of other stuff. Long hours of going thru a dungeon? Right. I’m forced to be a casual gamer, and a game like HALO fits my lifestyle.
This makes we curious about game sales becasue sales are down, but WoW keeps growing. More and more people are taking part in a virtual world that demands long stretches of time to play the game. Maybe this is because more people have faster connection speeds and can play MMOs. It’s new, fresh. And so,maybe, the slump in game sales is due to people buying games like WoW and spending months playing thise rather than completing one game and buying another.
But will the same thing happen to others as it did to me. I switched to a single-player game that allowed me to quit when I needed to. There wasn’t any peer pressure to stay.
And maybe when the shine wears off the sales of non-MMO games will increase.
