What does "core" even mean any more?

A year or two ago, it seemed that doom and gloom reigned over the prospects for "core" gaming. With smartphones and tablets becoming this decade's ubiquitous gaming devices, casual and social games ascendant and free-to-play established as just about the only effective way to make money from the teeming masses swarming to gaming for the first time, dire predictions abounded about the death of game consoles, the decline of paid-for games and the dwindling importance of "core" gamers to the games industry at large.

This week's headlines speak of a different narrative - one that's become increasingly strong as we've delved into what 2015 has to offer. Sony's financial figures look pretty good, buoyed partially by the weakness of the Yen but notably also by the incredible success of the PlayStation 4 - a console which more aggressive commentators were reading funeral rites for before it was even announced. Both of the PS4's competitors, incidentally, ended 2014 (and began 2015) in a stronger sales position than they were in 12 months previously, with next-gen home consoles overall heading for the 40 million sales mark in pretty much record time.

Then there's the software story of the week; the startling sales of Grand Theft Auto V, which thanks to ten million sales of the PS4 and Xbox One versions of the game, have now topped 45 million units. That's an incredible figure, one which suggests that this single game has generated well over $2 billion in revenue thus far; the GTA franchise as a whole must, at this point, be one of the most valuable entertainment franchises in existence, comparable in revenue terms to the likes of Star Wars or the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

"the GTA franchise as a whole must, at this point, be one of the most valuable entertainment franchises in existence, comparable in revenue terms to the likes of Star Wars or the Marvel Cinematic Universe"

Look, this is basically feel-good stuff for the games business; "hey guys, we're doing great, our biggest franchise is right up there with Hollywood's finest and these console sales are a promise of a solid future". Stories like this used to turn up all the time back when games were genuinely struggling to be recognised as a valid and important industry alongside TV, music and film. Nowadays, that struggle has been internalised; it's worth stepping back every now and then from the sheer enormity of figures like Apple and Samsung's smartphone sales, or Puzzle & Dragons' revenue (comparable to GTAV's, but whether that means the game can birth a successful franchise or sustain itself long-term is another question entirely), or the number of players engaged with top F2P games, to remind ourselves that there's still huge success happening in the "traditional" end of the market.

The take-away, perhaps, is that this isn't a zero-sum game. The great success of casual and social games, first on Facebook and now on smartphones, isn't that they've replaced core games, cannibalising the existing high-value market; it's that they've acquired a whole new audience for themselves. Sure, there's overlap, but there's little evidence to suggest that this overlap results in people engaging less with core games; I, for one, have discovered that many smartphone F2P games have a core loop that fits nicely into the match-making and loading delays for Destiny's Crucible.

"The massive success of a game like GTAV has a dark side; it reflects the increasing polarisation of the high-end games market"

That's not to say that changes to the wider business haven't resonated back through the "core" games space. The massive success of a game like GTAV has a dark side; it reflects the increasing polarisation of the high-end games market, in which successful games win bigger than ever, but games which fail to become enormous hits find themselves failing utterly. There's no mid-market any more; you're either a complete hit or a total miss. Developers have lamented the loss of the "AA" market (as distinct from the "AAA" space) for some time; that loss is becoming increasingly keenly felt as enormous budgets, production values and financial pressures come to bear on a smaller and smaller line-up of top-tier titles. Several factors drove the death of AA, with production costs and team sizes being major issues, but the rise of casual games and even of increasingly high-quality indie titles undoubtedly played a role - creating whole new market sectors that cost far less to consumers than AA titles had done.

It's not just success that's been polarised by this process; it's also risk. At the high-end of the market, risk is simply unacceptable, such are the enormous financial figures at play. Thus it's largely left to the low-end - the indie scene, the flood of titles appearing on the App Store, on Steam and even on the likes of PlayStation Vita - to take interesting risks and challenge gaming conventions. Along the way, some of the talented creators involved in these scenes are either trying to engage new audiences, or to engage existing audiences in new ways; sometimes experimenting with gameplay and interactive, sometimes with narrative and art style, sometimes with business model or distribution.

"some of the talented creators involved in these scenes are either trying to engage new audiences, or to engage existing audiences in new ways"

All of which leads me to explain why I keep writing "core" games, with inverted commas around "core"; because honestly, I'm increasingly uncertain what this term means. It used to refer to specific genres, largely speaking those considered to have special resonance for geeky guys; gory science fiction FPS games, high fantasy RPGs, complex beat-'em-ups and shoot-'em-ups, graphic survival horror titles, war-torn action games. Then, for a while, the rise of F2P seemed to make the definition of "core" shimmer and reform itself; now it meant "games people pay for up front, and the kind of people who pay for those games".

Now? Now, who knows what "core" really means? League of Legends is certainly something you have to be pretty damn deeply involved with to enjoy, but it's free-to-play; so is Hearthstone, which is arguably not quite so "core" but still demands a lot of attention and focus. There are great games on consoles - systems whose owners paid hundreds of dollars for a devoted gaming machine - which are free-to-play. There are games on mobile phones that cost money up front and are intricate and engrossing. There are games you can download for free on your PC, or pick up for a few dollars on Steam, that explore all sorts of interesting and complex niches of narrative, of human experience and of the far-flung corners of what it means to play a "game". Someone who sits down for hours unravelling the strands of a text adventure written in Twine; are they "core"? Someone who treats retro gaming like a history project, travelling back through the medium's tropes and concepts to find their origin points; are they "core"? How about Frank Underwood in House of Cards, largely disinterested in games but picking up a violent shooter to work out frustrations on his Xbox in the evenings; is he a "core gamer"?

"Don't get me wrong; this fuzzing of the lines around the concept of "core" is, to my mind, a vital step in the evolution of our medium"

Don't get me wrong; this fuzzing of the lines around the concept of "core" is, to my mind, a vital step in the evolution of our medium. That the so-called "battle" between traditional business models and F2P, between AAA studios and indies, between casual and core, was not a zero-sum game and could result in the expansion of the entire industry, not the destruction of one side or another, has been obvious from the outset. What was less obvious and took a little more time to come to pass was that not only would each of those sides not detract from the others; they would actually learn from one another and help to fuel one another's development. New creative outlooks, new approaches to interactivity, new thoughts on social and community aspects of gaming, new ideas about business models and monetisation; these all mingle with one another and help to make up for the creative drought at the top of the AAA industry (and increasingly, at the top of the F2P industry, too) by providing a steady feed of new concepts and ideas from below.

It's fantastic and very positive that the next-gen consoles are doing well and that GTAV has sold so many copies (dark thoughts regarding the polarisation of AAA success aside); but it's wrong, I think, to just look at this as being "hey, core gaming is doing fine". Games aren't made up of opposed factions, casual at war with core; it's a spectrum, attracting relevant audiences from across the board. Rather than pitting GTAV against Puzzle and Dragons, I'd rather look at the enormous success of both games as being a sign of how well games are doing overall; rather than stacking sales of next-gen consoles against sales of smartphones and reheating old arguments about dedicated game devices vs multi-purpose devices, I'd rather think about the enormous addressable audience that represents overall. As the arguments about casual or F2P gaming "destroying" core games start to fade out, let's take this opportunity to rid ourselves of some of our more meaningless distinctions and categories for good.