Lately I've noticed, and maybe this has been going on a for a while, that the game downloads area of Apple.com is so often full of casual games. Typically the graphics are really nice and polished and actually a high quality, but the kind of games they are is usually the casual match-3, hidden object hunt, mahjong, sodoku, puzzle etc type of games.
These games also often have quite a `social` or `real-life` type of theme, like working in a diner, babysitting, working in a chocolate shop, etc and they usually feature human characters that people can relate to - it's almost following along the same lines as the popularity of `reality tv` shows. This is obviously a whole different market to the `old days`, focussing on your everyday regular-lifestyle casual human and relating to them on the level of the kind of experiences they have in their real lives, rather than so much along the lines of fantasy.
Theses games are not bad or wrong, obviously there is an increasing market for them and it's much easier for independent developers to create relatively simple games, but what has happened to the classic game styles? Where are the platform games, the shoot-em-ups, the beat-em-ups, the graphical adventures? Do you think that these classic genre's have dissolved into a generic pool of gaming, largely driven by 3D environments, or can there still be a place for/revival of these games? Have things moved on too far in terms of what society finds interesting or how they think, that such game styles are no longer appealing? Can there be a hybrid game style between what we have now and what we used to have? What has happened and where are things heading?
These games also often have quite a `social` or `real-life` type of theme, like working in a diner, babysitting, working in a chocolate shop, etc and they usually feature human characters that people can relate to - it's almost following along the same lines as the popularity of `reality tv` shows. This is obviously a whole different market to the `old days`, focussing on your everyday regular-lifestyle casual human and relating to them on the level of the kind of experiences they have in their real lives, rather than so much along the lines of fantasy.
Theses games are not bad or wrong, obviously there is an increasing market for them and it's much easier for independent developers to create relatively simple games, but what has happened to the classic game styles? Where are the platform games, the shoot-em-ups, the beat-em-ups, the graphical adventures? Do you think that these classic genre's have dissolved into a generic pool of gaming, largely driven by 3D environments, or can there still be a place for/revival of these games? Have things moved on too far in terms of what society finds interesting or how they think, that such game styles are no longer appealing? Can there be a hybrid game style between what we have now and what we used to have? What has happened and where are things heading?