Nintendo says ‘there is no casual gaming’

His comments were made at a special showcase of software for the company’s new WiiWare downloadables channel at Nintendo of Europe’s Germany HQ.

He told the assembled journalists: “I don’t like the word casual. There’s a lot of meaning and interpretation of the word. For me you’re either a gamer or a non-gamer. You can spend time playing ten or twenty hours playing a Wii game or Flash game on the ‘net. The people who play all these games are core gamers. A 50 year-old woman who only plays Brain Training? She’s still a gamer – because she’s playing like a core gamer.”

He explained: “Really, you get different kinds of gamer. The casual word I don’t like so much because people tend to consider that something which is casual needs to be easy. If you’re good at any game you can play it on a high difficulty level.”

He said that it would be a mistake for developers to “consider that casual games are different to core games” and added that the idea that only casual games should have “incredibly gameplay, and be very simple and easy to understand” was a mistake.

“Someone can become a core gamer by playing any title,” he added, returning to the point about the games-playing audience.

Nintendo’s Animal Crossing franchise, Fischer, was a perfect example of this. The game’s original GameCube release was only enjoyed by a niche audience; “It was really an otaku game – it had a small community of people playing a lot,” he explained.

However that all changed when the game was released on the Nintendo DS when it was marketed to a wider user base of female players and “suddenly became a massmarket game – but the concept didn’t change at all.

“So there was no notion of casual gaming, it was just a different way to play.”