With games such as “Angry Birds”, “Candy Crush”, “Farmville” and “Pet Society”, what do all these games have in common? They are all Casual games and Social games or both. What is the decisive factor to making all these games so popular? For Social games, they appeal to the player’s need to socialize with their friends. By making their games multiplayer, they are effectively allowing the player to spend time with their friends and other people. The best example for this is a Facebook game known as “Pet Society”. “Pet Society” is a game where players can make animal avatars of themselves and live the life of their avatar pets. The game’s main mechanic is basically to obtain virtual money which can be used to purchase clothes and other amenities to doll up your pet avatar and their avatar’s home and visiting their friends. When players visit their friends their avatar can interact with each other playing games, cooking, talking and essentially socialize with each other. By allow players to connect with other players online, the game entices people to pay and play their games. As for Casual gaming, they are significantly easier to pick up and play compared to hardcore “AAA” games. Take the most successful example game, known as “Candy Crush”. What is the high concept to “Candy Crush”? To stack candies of the same colour together to create combos and gain points. “Candy Crush” starts off very …show more content…
Games need not be revolutionary, sophisticated, out of this world, or the newest sparkling clean technology of the future to be successful, if they don’t crave it, they won’t praise it. This can be seen with two distinct examples of Nintendo’s consoles comparing the Nintendo’s Wii to Nintendo’s ill-fated Virtual Boy. The Nintendo Wii was a huge success, because it understood its target demographic, and provided for its target demographic, it advertised itself as a social experience one where families, the elderly, and the young could enjoy together. This clicked well with the demographic, and led to its phenomenal success. It provided an experience targeted at families, and individuals who do may not have identified themselves as gamers, and provided an experience tailored to them that they could enjoy with others. The Wii itself introduced motion controls, which were intuitive and innovative, and it can be clearly seen with most of the advertising for the Wii, the focus was not on what was on the screen, but more of the actions, interactions the console provided between people. The Wii was most definitely not the strongest control of its time, nor did it have the best graphics. Which is the focus of