Over the last week we've seen a bit of fallout with the release of Street Fighter V. There are quite a few people who feel that at its core, SFV is a solid game: good mechanics, works great. However, it is severely lacking in features, especially play modes. For the hardcore fighting game fan, this isn't really an issue. As it stands, the game has what they want already: a decent-sized roster of characters and an online versus mode. Be that as it may, a lot of people are upset by this, ie. everyone else who isn't hardcore aficionados of the genre. There are quite a lot of people that get these games with little to no intent of ever playing against another human being. They want a story, cool characters, maybe some other interesting modes tossed in, and if they can successfully pull off most of the moves along the way, so much the better.
Given the bare bones state of Street Fighter V's launch, these casual fans of fighters are a bit miffed. It doesn't matter if there's more content coming down the line. They plunked down $60 and they aren't finding a whole lot that they want to do with the game. The worrying, and not entirely unexpected, thing about all of this is how a vocal quadrant of hardcore community lashed out at the casuals voicing their concerns about the state of the game. It really goes to show that there are some impressively narrow-minded, myopic individuals who are utterly lacking in foresight.
The diehards of any given hobby are always comprised of a very small, vocal minority. They have very specific things that they want and they'll make a bunch of noise until they get it. This isn't just the case with Street Fighter. We can see it in most genres. Look at the last 10-15 years of MMORPGs. There was a time when raiders, another small, noisy group of people, would shout and stomp their feet on a game's message boards until they got what they want. The problem was that there were a lot of other people playing the game, quietly enjoying regular dungeons, leveling alts, dressing up their characters, or being silly with friends in a hub town. As the tiny group of raiders were increasingly catered to, everyone else was feeling left out when it came to new content. Sure they could raid, but if they're generally uninterested in such activities, it seemed silly to force one's self to. So, over time, as the casual set was increasingly left behind, they let out a collective, "Okay, bye, I guess..." and quit these games. This resulted in a sizable loss in customers for these games, and their publishers began to worry, scrambling to find ways to win back these people who unbenounced to them, were actually a larger source of revenue than the smaller, noisier group of "hardcore" players.
This could be translated to one genre after the next. How many people love competitive Starcraft? A decent amount, sure, but how many more view stuff like custom maps and clicking on units repeatedly so that they say silly things as highlights of the game? A lot more. This is one of the things that is nice about the game. Hardcore folks get their ladder and off they go while the casual crowd can just go off and do as they like in these custom modes or just enjoying the story. The game stays accessible to new players and those that have no interest in playing at a high level while also being good to go for the more competitive crowd.
There are some folks that shout on the internet about how they play competitively and think everyone else should as well, and it's turned into a bit of an echo chamber where these people get together and start thinking it's the natural order of things without stopping to think that there are quite a few people out there that don't feel the same. Whether it's hardcore members of the fighting game community, MOBA players arguing about normal matches vs. ranked, or MMO raiders, they just start talking among themselves, earnestly agreeing with one another while shouting down descent.
For a time, it may well seem like what they're doing is working, but often as the months and years pass we see less and less casuals entering into these games because they just don't want to deal with any of that and the games don't offer features or game modes that they're interested in. Moreover, this leaves a limited pool of hardcore folk, and that cohort of people inevitably shrinks as its members get older, their priorities / life circumstances change, and they find themselves leaving the scene. Then what happens to these games? Their publishers are businesses, not charities. If they aren't making enough money to support their product or they think future games in the genre won't sell well, the suits that make all of the big, money-related decisions at the company may not greenlight future projects.
So, hardcore gamers need to think long and hard whether they want to put these walls around the games that they love so much. If they can support them financially on their own, great. However, if that isn't the case, casuals are an absolute necessity for many games to continue to exist, never mind flourish. Shouting at the "filthy casuals" may score brownie points in their little circles, but it may well actually kill off the games these people love if they aren't careful.
