I have one more post in me about casual games. Here is the last post I wrote about it in which I wondered if there was any practical way to make casual games better. And, more to the point, was there any motivation to do it when casual gamers were willing to buy just about any slop? I’m including myself in that, by the way. I will buy games that satisfy the itch for a casual game, even if said game isn’t very good.
I will buy any basic solitaire game or match-3 game because my standards are so low for those kinds of games. As long as the games run ok; I can read the font; and it’s has decent visuals, I’l lbuy it. Actually, I say that these are very low standards, but there are many more games than you would probably think that don’t meet even those base standards. There are some that won’t even start. There are some that take forever to load. And there are some that crash somewhere during gameplay.
I’m not saying hardcore games don’t do that because they do, but not with the frequeny of casual games. Also, hardcore games have more of an excuse than do casual games. The amount of money poured into hardcore games is astronomical whereas I’m assuming that it’s much less the case for casual games.
I mean, let’s do the math. A hardcore game costs anywhere from $60-$80, if we’re talking Triple A. Indie games are much less with most of them falling in the $20 range (give or take five bucks). A casual game is $6.99 for the standard edition and $13.99 for a collector’s edition. A Triple A deluxe edition tends to be ten dollars more than the standard edition. The collector’s edition can be anything over a hundred bucks and is usually outrageously expensive because of some included trinket. Trinket meaning statue or something like that.
Interestingly enough, I just played the demo for the next MCF (Mystery Case Files) Hidden Object Game (HOG), which is a BigFishGames original. Not developed by them directly, but published by them. Or at least it was. They call this a spin-off game of the series so it might not be canon. It’s called Fragments of Truth (GrandMA Studios), and it’s been interesting.
Huh. It turns out that the first few games of the series were developed internally (the first in 2005), and then other studios took over. I remember the first three or so, and they were really good. In fact, they were considered the gold standard for HOGs for the next several years. Hmmmmm. I was thinking that the quality started dipping with the game that starred Lea Thompson, which I thought was the sixth or seventh game. It turns out that it was the ninth game, called Shadow Lake. It was released in 2012, and it was the last game developed by Big Fish Studios.
No wonder I thought the quality had dropped after that one. Well, to be brutally honest, during that one. There was something missing, though I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. I was dissatified with it, though I could not tell you exactly why.