Quote Originally Posted by VeloZer0 View Post
What makes you think casual money is going to develop 'hardcore' products? If I was raking in money from a new market why on earth would I re-invest it into my old market with a much lower ROI. More likely money coming in for casual is being re-invested into casual. If what you said was true the Wii would have a 'hardcore' line up that put the others to shame.

I don't see this casual money helping hardcore gamers at all. The only benefit I can see is increasing sales of consoles to lower the per unit cost.
I'm saying that development costs are so low for those games in relation to the income that there is literally too much to even feed back into the casual development. It's simply more than they need. For studios that do a little of both, the excessive overflow feeds the hardcore side. I think this is most true with first party studios, but not completely untrue of the rest.

You've still got your Zygna's, but even they aren't evil. They are the gateway drugs of the gaming world. People who would scoff at mainstream gaming will play Farmville type games and some of them might even start to try other stuff. I'm actually interested to see what happens with the Civilization game on Facebook. That's something that could cast a wide net and bring a few non-gamers to try out a real civilization game. The target for that net are the people playing Farmville incessantly. The same Skinner-box effect will draw them in.