All the other developers taking part in the competition were core developers, or at the very least developers of high quality commercial games for which the player has to pay.
It's pretty obvious that a developer of free browser games can count on a massive number of casual users (some say 80 million), that obviously dwarf the numbers of the followers of any core developer out there. On top of it, Zynga's games are based on Facebook, and given that The Escapist has Facebook Connect enabled, Zynga's fans were literally two click away from voting, while voters that didn't use the social network had to go through creating an account.
Many argued that Zynga wasn't in the same league as the other participating developers, and they had an unfair advantage regardless of quality (or lack of thereof).
Such concerns proved true as the contest started, with Zynga's admins spamming their whole userbase shamelessly in order to rally votes and gain undeserved victories round after round, eliminating NCSoft, Infinity Ward, Rockstar North and Square Enix.
As they reached the semifinals, they finally faced Valve, one of the most respected and historically relevant game developers of the industry.
Valve immediately took the lead by a couple thousand votes, as the loyal followers obviously voted for them with no hesitation. Then something strange (but not unexpected) happened: several thousand votes for Zynga started to downpour on the poll, overtaking Valve easily. The administrators of the casual company had again unsheathed their secret weapon: Spam.
As they repeatedly begged their millions of casual gamers on Facebook for votes, Zynga managed to keep Valve behind pretty much constantly. Every time Valve managed to overtake them, a couple thousands of fresh votes for Zynga appeared.
That's when core gamers from every corner of the world decided that enough was enough.
The usual rivalries that normally divide the core gaming fandom were put aside for four days, in an unwritten truce that rallied everyone under Valve's flag. The pride of the hardcore gamers was at stake.
From then on, a truly epic battle started, with Valve and Zynga overtaking each other over and over. Despite facing a seemingly endless horde, the core gamers campaigned for Valve basically everywhere: on Twitter, on Facebook, on Youtube, on fan forums and even on the official forums of their favourite developers. No matter where, anywhere there were gamers the call to arms sounded, and while wave after wave of rabid Facebook casuals crashed on the poll, the core gamers held the line valiantly.
Even on the thread dedicated to the other semifinal, a very heated confrontation between Bioware and Blizzard, that was almost a battle of philosophies that generated flame after flame basically everyone still answered to the call. Valve had to win.
In the morning of the fourth day, as the smoke cleared, the Valve flag was still standing, encircled by thousands of beaten virtual farmers.
Valve was finally leading solidly by about 2500 votes. Despite having faced millions, the hardcore gamers were still standing, bloodied but unbowed, as the first glimpse of victory finally revealed itself to their tired eyes.
A few hours later the battle came at an end, as the hordes of virtual farmers retreated beaten and broken to go back to plow their Facebook fields, the hardcore gamers stood victorious on the field of glory, after an epic clash that probably will go down in history.
Never before the hardcore gamer community had locked arms and joined hands so evidently and solidly, repelling the casual blight with unbending will.
As the day of the epic victory of Hardcore gaming over casual entertainment comes to an end there's a message for everyone to hear: The press may be saying again and again that the era of casual games may be dawning. They may be saying that day in which hardcore games will disappear into the the night is coming, but today is not that day. Today we won and justice has been restored in the gaming universe.
No matter what they say. Hardcore gamers won't ever go down without a hell of a fight.
Also victors of the day were the Bioware fans, that managed to gain a solid victory against the rivals rooting for Blizzard, again demonstrating that a smaller but more dedicated and loyal fanbase can beat the partly casual-oriented behemoth.
But in the end, the true victor of the day is Hardcore gaming, so cheers, battle brothers!
We held the line, and now we get the spoils. Let us burn the virtual farms, crush the casual weaklings, see them driven before us and joyfully hear their lamentations. Victory is ours!
Noo, Blizzard, why!?
ReplyDeleteyou made it sound more epic than it really was but still i want to cry of happiness ;_;
ReplyDelete@Matt: Blizzard's fanbase is bigger, but has an higher percentage of semi-casual gamers, that despite being prompted by an official post on the WoW forum, didn't really care to go vote. Bioware has a smaller fanbase, but more loyal and dedicated, so probably the percentage of voters between them was higher.
ReplyDelete@Anonymous: I'm a core gamer, I like epic, what can I say :D
And actually lots of people put in quite a lot of effort in campaigning and promoting for valve. They deserve epic-level recognition :D
*Tear
ReplyDeleteMay we remember those that have fallen, and may the day of causal gaming never come. LONG LIVE HARDCORE.
awesome article.
Could not help but smile while reading this. While I feel the epic ness of this article is a little bit exagerated I must say that the idea of the hardcore banding together would be fucking epic. While reading I kept thinking of all those epic movies where good triumphs against evil, in LotR where Middle Earth bands together, in Independence Day where the nations of the world join forces to smite those alien fuckers and all the others where the common enemy forces us to band together and show, even if for a second, the true might we can achieve when we work as one. There is something that sets off the imagination when someone reads this and you can't help but see Valve in an all out slugfest against the Nazi-esque Zynga and just as they are about to drop to one knee IW comes in and helps them up, Valve looks around and sees that Square, Bethesda, Bioware, Insomniac, Konami and Rockstar are also by its side along with the rest of the Hardcore, ALL of it. As Valve begins to fight once again it isn't just under the banner of Valve, it is under the banner of Hardcore and its no longer a fight between Zynga and Valve it is a fight of Casual vs. Hardcore, a fight of right and wrong, a fight to see who Video Games belongs to and like hell we're giving it to the faceless mob that is the Casual.
ReplyDeleteGreatest read in a while.
ReplyDelete@Anonymous 2 posts above (lol get a nickname :P): Actually i did think about those movies :D The scene that mostly came to mind is this:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sFOl-QXpLc4
Unfortunately i couldn't find one with enbedding enabled, or I would have put it at the bottom of the article.
Sparta!!! :D
@Nelva Yes, that is exactly the kind of feeling I was getting, a call to arms like no other. For real guys, we all need to cover our faces with some bandanas and march down to Zynga and all these other casual games devs, esspecially whatever retard that keeps OKing those Nintendo shovel ware games due to the fact that he is ruining the name of what was holy in my childhood. Lets meet up, say 4 pm tomorrow at the McDonalds.
ReplyDeletelol I loved your text dude, amazing reading and I'm glad to see the results of this short union
ReplyDeleteepic....all that I have to say...
ReplyDeletewhat a amazing union..i almost jumped in joy when i read valve held cuz of us...epic...wat a presnetation..
ReplyDeletehardcore? mass effect isn't hardcore its a piece of cake, it has nothin to do with hardcore, wow i can hav virtual sex with an alien, amazing!!! get out of it, hardcore is just a lable by publishers to trick you kids into buyin their products
ReplyDeleteI think you can thank the /b/tards for this one ;) QUICK!!! To the 4chan party van!!!
ReplyDelete"hardcore" is not really a matter of difficulty, as much as of depth, nowadays. Mass Effect might not be a difficult game, but it's most definitely deep.
ReplyDeleteHad I been aware, I would have tossed in my vote as well.
ReplyDeleteYou brought a smile on my face today with this article, thanks :)
Hey, do you still play Warhammer Online? Is the game still alive?
ReplyDeletenot at the moment I'm afraid. I know it's still alive, but I'm on a leave from MMORPGs until Final Fantasy XIV or Tera Online hit :D
ReplyDeleteI've been interested in this back-and forth for awhile. Glad to see it came out the way it should have. Gaming should remain a hobby for the few, instead of a mass-produced, easily-digestible culture for all.
ReplyDeleteBy all means, bask in the joy of victory, for I fear that hardcore days are numbered. As the gaming companies get larger and merge under even larger parent companies, the true god of the corporate-sphere (money) will demand penance and evermore monetary sacrifices in his name. It does no good for the hardcore developers to stick to their guns when their parent bosses demand their donations to corporate coffers.
ReplyDeleteAlways on the lookout for the next quick buck, you can bet the corporate boardrooms are drooling over the prospect of "free" gaming (i.e. microtransactions) and the massive margins that these simplistic games provide. After all, this is what the share-holders demand (the share-holders overwhelmingly, of course, being the already rich looking for more riches).
Doubt me? Where did space-based combat flight simulators go? They were profitable...but not nearly as profitable as FPS, so they stopped making them. Only as long as the money flows better than the alternatives will hardcore gaming live on...
FOR THE MOTHERLAND
ReplyDeleteFUCK ZYNGA, FUCK FARMVILLE, AND ALL THOSE OTHER SHITTY FACEBOOK APPS!!
ReplyDeleteLONG LIVE VALVE!!
Let me be the first to say:
ReplyDeleteThis was a triumph
I'm making a note here: HUGE SUCCESS
It's hard to overstate my satisfaction
I'm proud to say that I was a part of that thread and as long as I am a gamer, I will remeber it.
ReplyDeleteWhile you may have overdramatized it, it was a pretty accurate description. By Saturday Morning, Zynga had a 3,000 vote lead over Valve. I looked at that number and nearly puked.
All the time spent on the thread, arugeing, recruiting, telling people how to work the Twitter votes....wasted. It was until I heard from a friend that the Valve had taken a lead and that so many were coming that the thread would not load for several hours (Leading to multiple jokes and many laughs)
Despite what the thread may say, this was not a victory for Valve. This was a victory for gamers everywhere and all will know that we will fight and die before we let the casual scourge win!
I was there.
ReplyDeleteI was disappointed in how Valve voters ignored the earlier rounds (causing defeats of solid devs like Square Enix, Rockstar, etc...) but expected the "rest of the gaming world" to come to their aid. It was the usual BS we get from arrogant Valve supporters.
But I'm glad that Zynga was defeated.
Article is biased, and does not represent many of the facets of the actual competition. In fact Zynga had been up on Valve for much of the battle, and even with the combined efforts of the core gamers, towards the end Zynga had been 3k votes up on Valve. It was only when Valve began advertising the event in their steam launcher that they managed to overtake Zynga. I find it unfair that the author of this criticizes Zynga for advertising this event. When Valve did the very same thing, even had a sticky thread in it's forums since the beginning of the match. That being said, neither does this article talk about the hostility that the Valve supporters showed to the Zynga supporters. Not quite, the noble battle that this author states that it is.
ReplyDeleteHonestly this wasn't really exaggerated, the whole way through the 4 days I was going buts when I saw Zynga winning. When I saw Valve pass Zynga I almost went into tears. I have been with the escapist for a while now and when I saw Zynga overtake the gaming website it was extremely disheartening!
ReplyDeleteValve putting an ad on their launcher is nowhere comparable with the prolonged and insistant spam Zynga sent to their users during the whole duration of the competition starting from the first round, and the abuse of the facebook connect function of the site.
ReplyDeleteThey simply responded in kind(quite late, by the way) to Zynga's spam.
Valve's encouragement to their users to vote was actually very subtle (I had to purposedly look for it in order to find it) and very classy.
As for the poor victimized Zynga supporters being target of "hostility"? It isn't very surprising given the spammy and trollish attitude most of them displayed when posting on the forum.
A gaming dedicated forum isn't Facebook. There are rules and there is a level of decency under which one shouldn't fall. They should have learned how to behave in such an environment before posting. They didn't, and were treated accordingly.
As virtual farmers should very well know, one reaps what he sows.
Well it seems obvious that you weren't there for the event. Or you would have known that Valve supporters were hostile to the Zynga supporters as a majority. In fact few Zynga supporters even posted there. When they did, it was usually a one-liner or two. Also, Zynga advertised this on their forums and on their Forums page. Which the minority of the users occupy. If they had made it so that they had a link on any one of their launchers, Valve would have been smoked.
ReplyDeleteI guess Valve wanted to win this more than Zynga did, and no, they weren't subtle. As soon as you loaded the steam launcher a big window pops up asking for a vote. Not so subtle as you state.
So yeah, all anyone has to do is look back at each and every round and see that it was the Valve supporters that were the most hostile.
Actually I was there, thank you. You, unfortunately, seem to have a quite biased vision of it all.
ReplyDeleteWhat you defined "a one liner or two" were a storm of spam in thypical facebook style.
Valve did nothing else that respond in kind (and in a way more classy way) to an attitude Zynga held from the very start.
If the hardcore opponents of Zynga did so from the start, you could be sure that Zynga wouldn't have even won the first round against NCSoft.
Oh, and by the way. Most Steam users set the launcer to open on window startup, so most of them don't even see the news popup. Try again.
Well once again you have proved that you weren't there because you never bothered to produce a counter-argument or post examples:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/532.183541-Poll-Round-4-The-Great-Eight-North-4-Square-Enix-vs-7-Zynga-VOTING-CLOSED?page=88
A user here was kind enough to quote a few of the SE supporters and their one liners. Proof is in the pudding. So I guess, it's not all "Facebook Style" as you suggest ;). Try again.
Actually the hardcore opponents were quite hostile to Zynga supporters in Round 1-2 particularly, and yet Zynga still won. I'll even give you the link, because I know you would have trouble finding it:
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/532.182325-Poll-Round-2-North-7-Zynga-vs-2-Infinity-Ward-VOTING-CLOSED
Also, you suggest that Most steam users never turn off their computer? You even go so far as to assume most have it on windows startup? It's so illogical that anyone who reads that will know you are just making stuff up now, because you are cornered, and can't deny that.
Ah, blessed ignorance. You might want to check your facts before you come spamming a blog as much as the zynga fans did on the poor Escapist forums.
ReplyDeleteWhen you set the Steam launcher to open on startup the news popup does NOT appear. Get that? Give it a try.
And congratulations for posting about someone cherry picking a few examples as opposed to a whole sea from the Zynga fanfarmers.
Since you went as far as posting the link of the thread between Zynga and IW, give a look to page 2.
A good portion is made up by pro-zynga facebook-style spam. And the subsequent pages are no different.
Not surprising that such a trollish attitude has been met with hostility.
The truth is very simple. Zynga shouldn't have even been part of that competition. Their business model and market share is too different from every single one of the other competitors.
They're not in the same league, and of course true gamers took offence at their presence.
So you call evidence and facts, spam? That's called a straw-man argument, and is the tactic of a desperate man. I post facts, and you try to refute them without evidence. The only person here being ignorant is you, and you continue to prove it with each and every post ;).
ReplyDeleteI never argued that the steam launcher doesn't have news-popups when it is in your tray. I argued that to make a fallacious statement that most users do this. Which is nothing more than your speculation, hey, just because you do it. Doesn't mean everyone else does. It's too bad you didn't understand me, I suppose I won't use so many big words around you.
There was no cherry picking involved. In fact, you proved you weren't there yet again, because if you had.You would know that fans of all the other developers did the same. I just didn't want to bothered making a huge quote of all the non zynga voters one liners, because in all honesty. I know you would just try to dismiss it, and you aren't worth the time. You've shown that you know nothing about the actual competition.
All you likely heard was a few tidbits from people who were actually there and fighting.
It's seems you are avoiding the subject of the hostile anti-zynga voters. That means you found them and are now going back to trying to diverge the subject by talking about spam again.
Too bad you have to resort to such pathetic tactics, I guess you really can't come up with anything original.
I'm a bit surprised by Zynga's entry as well. They did not fit in with the usual developers that were there. The escapist must have it reasons, but I don't know what that could be.
Oh i know such reasons. It's called controversy. It's what gives most traffic to sites nowadays.
ReplyDeleteOh and by the way, you might as well use your nickname Waif, i know very well who you are, despite your continuous use of anonimity, it's very easy to spot you, since you tried to pass this argument for *countless* posts on the escapist website, over several threads.
You sure do have quite a spammy attitude, I'd say.
I'm glad I'm not worth your time, because otherwise I'd find myself spammed like you spammed the escapist forums with 235 posts in a few days :D
You say that my argument that most steam users have it in the tray is my speculation? And pray tell, what's this statement of yours if not speculation?
Steam has several messaging and utility functions embedded, without mentioning game updating and such. It's pretty natural that most dedicated users keep it running all the time.
I didn't dismiss at all your argument about the hostile anti Zynga voters. What I said, several times, is that such hostility was absolutely justified.
The zinga fans, prompted by the massive spam from the "developer" (quotes are mandatory here) fell on the escapist forum like trollish locusts, spamming like hell. The second link you decided to provide proves that beyond any reasonable doubt.
I was there fighting as much as anyone else, as much as I did on twitter, and on other developers' forums (the Bioware one for instance). Sorry to burst a bubble.
Heya,Kiru here,one of the people posting rallying pictures and screaming about spam on the escapist(you know,one of EVERYONE.)And I find it hilarious,that no matter what happened,Zynga kept spamming and spamming,blogging,and saying GAOW ZINGA while,all it took was a mass rally,one post from steam,and several thousand twitter votes.
ReplyDeleteHey Kiru. Honestly I find it's too bad that the gaming community didn't wake up earlier. If we rallied immediately Zynga would have slapped out of the contest on the first round, and legit contestants like Infinity Ward, Rockstar, NCSoft and Square Enix would have continued to add value to the competition.
ReplyDeleteSo now you have regressed to petty insults? Well I do find that amusing. All things considered. That and if you had looked at the content of my posts you would see that these posts were acquired through complex discussion on the March Mayhem since it began. Which if you had known from being there. Lasted more than just a few days. I guess you can't count or do research.
ReplyDeleteI like how you implied that I'm doing this to remain anonymous. In fact, I just wasn't bothered to have my real name here. Because this is nothing more than an inane blog about a subject the author knows little about. All of your inaccuracies prove that you either weren't there and got hearsay or you were, and didn't understand what was going on.
My argument about steam is not speculation, it is in fact logic and reasoning. Something you obviously have no concept of.
Also I say again that many of the Zynga users didn't even post at all. That link I showed you did not have the "Locust- Like" spam you claim it to be. Also if you feel that hostility, hatred, and the unfounded insults hurled by Valve supporters are justified. Then you have proven just what kind of a person you are. I do hope that you are not representative of the majority of Valve users.
Of course, once again, if you were there fighting with the rest you would have known the details I already laid out that your article has so obviously omitted. Therefore I find your claim hard to believe, as would anyone who has been there would feel.
Waif (since you're not denying it's you), I think it's people like you that have caused at least a portion of the Zynga hatred. Your posts are so hostile and condescending.
ReplyDeleteI admit I didn't read many of the posts in the tournament, but I voted in pretty much every round (I missed the first). I voted against Zynga. I even play a couple Zynga games...but only as a brief time killer once or twice a day. I have sunk more time into games that were developed by each of the companies Zynga beat then all of Zynga games combined.
I don't hate Zynga...I just feel that it was a tragedy that it took what it did for them to be overthrown. Now, how did Zynga do it? I'm going to tell you what Giuseppe has been telling you. Spam.
5-6 times a day, when you signed on to Facebook, if you play any Zynga game, they will be asking you to go vote for them. How hard would it be for all those Facebook people to click a few times and have cast a vote for Zynga? Had they fought fair (advertising is fine, as long as it's once a day like Bioware did and not shoved down your throat like Zynga did), they would have lost to Infinity Ward. Perhaps even NC Soft.
It truely was an epic feeling to watch Valve (Hardcore gamers) rally and defeat Zynga (Casual gamers) on a website designed and directed towards the hardcore gaming community. Now we can have Valve vs. Bioware in a true final of fantastic developers.
Thank you to all who rallied behind Valve, despite who your personal favorite developer may be or how you personally feel about them.
Giuseppe, thanks for writing an entertaining article. Sorry to see that someone had to come attack you on your blog in a hateful lashing out because Zynga lost.
By the way, my name on Escapist's forums is Soljourn. I don't post much, but keep an eye out for me if you like.
I'm a Bioware fan, and I rallied every person I could muster under the Valve flag. I have to say, I am truly glad that we could hold this off, as it was a crying shame to have Zynga in a core developers' battle.
ReplyDeleteThat said, I'll give Zynga their due - they really pulled out all the stops to try and win. And this makes me dislike the company even more. Their "underhanded" tactics were truly not in the nature of the competition and although their swathe through the other competitors may have drastically changed the outcome of the competition, it was somehow worth it to see the whole community unite under one banner.
Now we can go back to squabbling and bickering over inanities.
Joking aside; Check the final round for Valve vs Bioware. It's so civil compared to the previous round. Nobody minds if their rival wins, because both developers are such fantastic companies and both deserve to win.
-Escapist's Aurora219
This brought tears to my eyes.
ReplyDeleteDespite our differences in favourite developers, when faced with a challenge to hardcore games as a whole, we unite and become immovable.
GAMER PRIDE.
As to the next round, well, let's carry the comradeship over and keep it civil.
"Of course, once again, if you were there fighting with the rest you would have known the details I already laid out that your article has so obviously omitted. Therefore I find your claim hard to believe, as would anyone who has been there would feel."
ReplyDelete@Anonymous/Waif (lol at me revealing your REAL name, when I revealed your forum nickname, way to overdramatize) That's why no one else agrees with you? And why your opinion on the escapist forums themselves is so isolated that you needed to write that many posts in a few days in order to try and scream louder than the others? :D
Looks like "anyone who has been there", me included, doesn't feel the way you do.
Abram is right. Your biased, condescending, overly repeatitive and spammy posts did nothing else than increase the hostility towards the zynga spammers further.
The link you posted has 8 pro-zynga spam posts just on page 2, and continues the same way for several pages further.
It's lovely how some people manage to live in their own little self-created bubble and go on with attitudes like yours "I'm right! And everyone else that disagrees hasn't been there!"
Even if everyone else is actually disagreeing with them.
What can I say, please do go on and cuddle your delusions :D
@Aurora219 & Legendsmith: Yeah it's lovely to see how the last round (which normally would be the more heated) is indeed pretty civil and characterized by a climate of comradeship. It truly show how zynga was the blight upon this competition.
Sure, rivalries between fans of different developers will always be there, but seeing this is absolutely refreshing :D Thanks for commenting
Wow, thats incredible dude, well done.
ReplyDeleteLou
www.anonymous-surfing.us.tc
I don't understand the hate towards "casual" games. No one's telling you you can't have your 100+ hour masterpiece timesinks. I wish I still had time for them, it's an experience you just won't get from a simple game. But some of us old gamers get jobs and kids and a house and don't have hours on end to sink into a game anymore.
ReplyDeleteSo we play stuff that can be broken down into more manageable times. When you can run into cutscenes in games that can last as long as a TV episode (some of which don't let you pause), it makes it so you can't play that game unless you can dedicate the next couple hours to it or are resigned to maybe not being able to reach the save point and doing it all over again.. and again.
There's room enough in this world for both types of games. Don't like the casual games, don't play them. But listening to "hardcore" gamers whine and whine about them is really getting old.
What's getting old is listening to sensationalistic media cover that social/casual games like they were the ragnarok of hardcore games.
ReplyDeleteMind you, I don't have much time, but nowadays games in which cutscenes can't be paused or skipped are the exception, not the norm.
There are plenty hardcore games that can be played even as much as an half an hour at a time.
There's sure room enough for both type of games, but seeing the presence of a low quality, spam-happy free-game "developer" between the ones that made the history of gaming, and their equally spam-happy fans invading a gaming forums, people felt the need to react.
Virtual farmers are very free to continue farming, as long as they don't try to cut down our forests. This time around they tried, and got their collective rears handed to them :D
Blizzard casual? WoW? Starcraft?
ReplyDeleteZynga cheated, by bribing its players with virtual money, in order to vote.
ReplyDeleteALSO the Escapist allowed facebook logins, which meant that most of the Valve gamers had to make a whole new account just to vote once.
What the hell are you talking about? I spent endless hours on the Diablo series and even wore out a mouse in the process (the average mouse is good for 163,000,000,000 left clicks).
ReplyDeleteI played the hell out of starcraft, and in asia it is still considered a professional sport.
And WoW takes at least a couple months to get to 80 then you have to raid which can end up being like a part time job that you have to pay for.
I think I beat mass effect in a week, same with bioshock. Bioware makes great games, I just don't think they are "Hardcore" and suck up the same amount of time as wow or any other blizzard game.
@outlaw686: i know the starcraft and diablo fanbase very well, but how do they compare, percentage-wise, to the whole Blizzard fanbase (and I mean the active ones)?
ReplyDeleteMost of the user of blizzard games are on WoW, and while WoW is a major timesink if you plan to master it, there's an enormous mass of extremely casual users that counterweight the hardcore raiders.
I did not say that WoW is a casual game, but that a large percentage of it's users are casual, because the "entry level" is lower, and the game is more mainstream.
On the other hand, Bioware games are less mainstream, and since they are long-winded stories the casual user is normally turned off by them.
So while the Bioware fanbase is smaller, the percentage of dedicated, hardcore fans compared to the total is higher.
A dedicated fan will take the time and bother to go create an account on a gaming site in order to vote and uphold the company he loves. Most casual gamers would shrug it off as spurious and go back to play.
I agree with Giuseppe. WoW can be played casually or played hardcore, which is why it appealed to the entire gaming populace (with a few exceptions). I was a WoW addict for several years, and still play casually. Bioware games...if you want to see the whole story (which is the only reason to play a single player RPG in my opinion) then be ready to sink 40-80 hours into the game. It takes less time to read some books. You could also sign on to WoW, do a few dailies, and be done.
ReplyDeleteI have 6 close friends who are also gamers. Of the 7 of us, 6 of us played WoW quite a bit. Of the 7 of us, 6 picked up Dragon Age: Origins. Of the 6 of us who did, I'm the only one who beat it. Also, 5 of us picked up Mass Effect 2. 2 of us beat that.
Of the 7 of us, 4 of us have at one time or another played a Zynga game. The other 3 have no interest in mindless clicking games like Mafia Wars and Farmville. Of the 4 of us who tried, 1 stopped entirely, 2 only play them once a week, and I only play once a day.
I have no problem with casual gaming. I enjoy a game of Bejeweled every now and then. But I am a hardcore gamer...I have been for 25 years (I'm 29). I respect the companies like Valve, Bioware, Square Enix, Blizzard, Rockstar, Bethesda, and many others. I even have a little respect for PopCap games, even if they target the casual gamers. I do not respect Zynga in the slightest.
I have such mixed feelings. I'm a hardcore casual player. My farming is done on the DS (Harvest Moon). I played so much Diablo 2 I'd hear jewels falling in my sleep. I play Mario games...but for 17-hour stretches. I played so much Zelda I thought I saw a Skulltula in the bathroom at 4am.
ReplyDeleteIt breaks my heart that since I don't personally care for FPS's, I'm not a "real gamer." I'm pissed I had to wait so long for a new console Zelda game. I'm so eager to see Diablo 3 I think I'm going to have an aneurysm. But that doesn't mean I don't play Mega Man 9, Kirby Super Star, and Lego Star Wars. That is, when I'm not kickin' it old school with pen and paper on the weekends.
Valve just happens to make primarily FPS games and happened to be the brand of choice when we all united to fight the farming hordes back, but that doesn't mean that only FPS games qualify as hardcore games.
ReplyDeleteActually, I don't care for FPS games much myself, i'm very, very selective with them, and they need to have a coherent, enjoyable story for me to consider them.
But don't worry, basically all the games you listed qualify fully as core games.
I loved the article and even though I refused to post in any of the MM topics (because I knew I would get into trouble) I saw the effects of it in every other topic. Suspended users here, users on probation there. The effects of MM are usually bad, but Zynga just made them worse, so I'm relieved that they're out of the competition.
ReplyDeleteI'm personally hoping that MM doesn't return next year. It doesn't benefit the site the way it should. Especially when you end up with companies like Zynga (and Turbine before them) spamming their users with messages to vote for them.
Kiru here,I've come back to once again see a lot of hate against and for people against Blizzard,while I may not agree with the people against Blizzard,Both me and my brother play it.I played it in the typical hardcore gamer style,moving up to different checkpoints,and finally got an 80.I was sad,it was far too easy now,and took off for a while,and this may or may not have been my fault,but i've been banned twice,once I didn't even get a chance to log on.Blizzard may or may not have the ability to detect hacking and account sharing as,even though i'm currently banned,they've sent me 8 or 9 more threats to ban me.My brother,on the other hand,has a tounge like cotton,soft and rarely sharp,has managed to stay unbanned,which I find fair,but to me this means Blizzard takes a corecasual stance,Gamers who don't play like gamers. This meaning someone willing to either sink loads of time into something with a reason or reasonlessly waste 2/3 hours on the game,and do something else.Its all just a vote of dedication,so can we stick to Zynga?
ReplyDeletehello Kiru. Don't worry. I wasn't speaking "against" Blizzard. I just specified that part of their fanbase is made by more casual players. There's nothing wrong with it :D
ReplyDeletejust, pure, awesome
ReplyDeletethank you... fantastic post
ReplyDeleteThis makes the clash sound absolutely epic and makes me glad that I contributed to Valve's victory, even in a small way.
ReplyDeleteAnyway, this post causes me to picture just a giant Lord of the Rings-esque type battle.