I recently had a conversation with my partner about the games Marathon, Destiny 2, and Helldivers 2. The conversation pertained to how many live service games seem to cater to the people who are hardcore fans as opposed to the casual people who, while are more likely to leave and come back to the game periodically, don’t spend as much money or time in the game. They are viewed as the “real fans” that the developer needs to cater to. The problem arises that when they cater to those hardcore fans it pushes away the casual player of their game.
For instance, if we look at games like Helldivers 2 and Destiny 2 you find communities filled with people who either in the past or present have complained that the game is just too easy. Both games have difficulty settings, but both have people claiming even the easiest or the next level up are just too damn easy. This has lead to both games having the developers trying to inject “challenge” back into the game. Which as also lead to some people simply dropping off from the games.
So with that, today I want to have another discussion about difficulty but it’ll be about how live service games that have some kind of balance to them can very easily lose the audience that gives the developers success. I’m going to talk about how when developers abandon the casual gamer they leave them behind and start to slowly and slowly narrow their audience leading to a more and more frustrating game for us casuals. I’ll be using some of my own personal experience here as well. Then I’ll talk about Whales, how these developers often drop casuals because they’re not where the real money is, just a few whales can make up for a bunch of lost casuals. Finally, I’ll talk about how the best thing developers can do is have the ability to withstand the accusations of being “too easy”. That when they hear that they shouldn’t make the whole game more difficult but instead focus on the high end of the difficulty scale. With that, let’s dive in.
Important note: when I refer to casuals in this piece I don’t usually mean casuals in general, I mean casual players of that specific genre or game. People who don’t spend all their time playing that one game or genre and sometimes go months without playing it. I am not referring to people who don’t usually play games and thus enjoy the hobby very very casually.
Let’s look at 2 games for this section, first: Destiny 2.
Destiny 2 was a game I played from Release until 2024 where I finished my time with it after the Final Shape expansion. It was a game I adored and had a ton of fun with both by myself and with friends and randoms. But there was this accusation made against the game for most of the time I played it that it was simply “too easy”. This was primarily said by hardcores on the subreddit and streamers. The whole basis was that the players were just so strong and the AI was just not that good so you could just walk away from the game in some of the end game content with enemies all around you and come back 10 minutes later and still be alive. This isn’t wrong, you could do that. But only if you had an amazing build with the system Bungie had created. A system that had a trash on-boarding process and didn’t teach you how to actually make something that strong. Instead you had to go and use a browser tool to get a good build going.
The problem arose then with the Lightfall expansion that Bungie wanted to “Bringing the challenge back into Destiny 2”. What this meant was increasing the damage of the enemies a fuck ton and make all areas that had that tuning an absolute slog to play. Even worse, they introduced different level scaling. Before you were able to over level for some of the hardest stuff in the game which made it all around easier. It was great because you could be a higher level and be able to do lower level stuff allowing you to feel strong. But with this “difficulty” pass they decided that you wouldn’t be able to over-level anymore. So no matter what you would be capped at that level in that content. This meant that you would always feel like you’re only just able to do whatever you were doing.
The best example of this is Patrols. Those are just when you go to a planet and are able to free-roam around the different zones and do different activities and stuff. It had always been a chill experience literally since the first games original release in 2014. But then, with this change, they made this newest Patrol zone absolutely brutal. Suddenly it was incredibly difficult to do events that, on other planets you could solo, but on this one you had to have others. This was just absolutely annoyingly unfun. And it showed, after an expansion the newest location is usually the one with the most players but very soon after this one launched this newest location was mostly empty. This meant you could barely do most of the events because they were meant to be super hard during what used to be a chill experience.
Bungie decided they wanted to listen to the vocal minority that were crying out about the difficulty, particularly the streamers. What this lead to was a big drop off of players, and it didn’t help that that years content wasn’t the best as well. They eventually made it worse with Final Shape when they introduced Power Deltas that locked you to always being under-leveled for almost all pieces of content which was horrible.
The point though is that they narrowed their view of who they wanted to play their game, and because of it they lost a ton of players and now, with the newest expansions not really being very good and there being large content droughts, the game is underwater and may as well be in Maintenance mode (I think it should be, not all games have to live forever).
You’d hope then that Bungie would learn from this with Marathon but nope (to be fair, Bungie never seems to learn since they make the same mistake over and over and over again just with years apart because well “maybe it’ll work this time”). Marathon is an extraction shooter, one I haven’t played more than just the server slam. But I’ve paid attention to the community because I’m a curious person. The game is rather hardcore, even if there are some more casual aspects compared to other games in the genre. At its core it’s a sweaty experience where you have to constantly be anxious and worried about being shot on sight by other players.
Now that might seem like just all extraction shooters but Arc Raiders proved that’s not accurate. You can make one that appeals to casual players by letting PvE be a viable alternative to PvP. Marathon though was originally started by the Destiny PvP team so it makes sense they’d push into that. The problem arises that the game at the start was more casual friendly but because of both some minor changes Bungie made and, primarily, the way the endgame is structured, the game loses casuals very quickly.
This is because the game has a narrow focus of who it wants to attract. During development Bungie would have a bunch of creators from other more hardcore extraction shooters come out and give feedback, they wanted those people to jump ship over to Marathon. The problem is those other games don’t have massive player bases like Bungie seems to want. Instead they have a more moderately sized dedicated fanbase that adores their games and are unlikely to jump ship.
During the initial first Alpha for Marathon the game was criticized for not leaning into the hardcore extraction shooter aspects enough. So with the actual release of the game they made changes and leaned into it more. Personally I think that may have been a mistake. Not because they might not have made good choices, I think some of them were likely well thought out. Instead I think it’s because those choices drove away the possible casuals that might have gotten sucked into their game and actually played it and enjoyed it instead of trying it and dropping it almost immediately because of how it’s structured, like I did.
At the end of the day both Marathon and Destiny 2 have allowed themselves to be impacted by vocal minorities in the community that have seemingly forced their hand to structure their games in certain ways that are very off putting to the casual enjoyer of videogames. What is someone to do when they want to play an extraction shooter and be able to just primarily play PvE and team up with all the players they come across? Because they won’t play Marathon, they’ll play Arc Raiders. And as for Destiny 2’s player base...well...they’ll just move on to different games.
My point here is just that when you narrow who you want to attract to your game you drive everyone else away. You drive away the people that have been playing your game off and on for a decade, you drive away people who enjoyed playing your game for hours and hours while listening to podcasts or while they just turned their brain off, you drive away people who might have been interested in the genre your game exists in, but aren’t interested in a sweaty experience where they’re constantly stomped because they haven’t played the game for a hundred hours in around 2 months like others. If you drive away the casuals of your playerbase then you will kill your live service game.
Find me being a casual on Patreon!
Okay, I definitely hear you say through your phone screen that I assume you read this on, casuals aren’t the ones driving the game, they aren’t the ones actually invested in it, the hardcore players are who keeps the game alive! Well guess what, you’re...mostly wrong. Now I am not saying that hardcore players aren’t the ones who are still logging on to the game even in times of just absolutely nothing to do, they absolutely are. But does that really mean they’re the ones keeping it alive? Given the massive spikes games experience when new content comes out wouldn’t that imply that there are far more players who exist out there that come and go from the game but still adore it and recommend it to their friends?
I myself am one of these players for Helldivers 2. It’s a game I’ve played off and on since it came out and I have loved almost all of my time with it! But because I haven’t played a thousand hours I’m somehow not helping keep the game alive? The hardcore players help, don’t get me wrong. They’re the whales in playtime and monetary purchases, but are they the real playerbase? Unless developers narrow their scope so much that they drive away everyone but the absolutely most hardcore players, which doesn’t usually happen, then it would make sense that these Whales are in fact a minority. That they’re the ones who are so in love with the game that they barely play anything else.
But they still aren’t the ones driving the game forward. That’s the casuals. Casuals are there off and on, just like me with Helldivers 2. They’re there when they want to be, they’ll spend money and they’ll recommend it to their friends but they’ll also not be super duper demanding to the developers. They’ll enjoy what they get and have issues with what they don’t, but they won’t push towards persecuting the developers to the point of death threats like what once happened to a Destiny 2 developer. Casuals aren’t what keeps a game going during content droughts but they are what keeps a game growing during a content flood. Whales are okay, but if you have a fuck ton of casuals who come and go from your game, who will be there when something happens and will also be willing to understand that your game doesn’t have to be everything for them, then you’re gonna have a game that grows, a game that thrives when new things come around.
Like nature, there’s an ebb and flow to a games playerbase. In nature, droughts happen and some things thrive during that drought (the whales) while others don’t (the casuals). But eventually droughts end, a rainstorm comes in and the things that weren’t thriving or were dying during the drought now come back. They bring the life back to the environment, even help it spread and grow lusher than ever before. The casuals of games drive them forward, not the whales.
Games have difficulty, I get it. I’ve written about difficulty before (primarily here), it’s one of my most passionate topics. I want games to be able to both meet the demands of people who want a difficult experience and those who want something easier and more relaxed. I think all of the games I have talked about in this are capable of that. All they have to do is resist the temptation and pestering of a vocal minority to narrow their focus to just hardcore players.
I know that’s hard, I mean, those players are the ones playing the game during droughts, the ones who constantly buy a fuck ton of your micro-transactions (a video going through all the Helldivers 2 Micro-transactions can be seen below but at least there you can earn the currency by playing). But I believe all developers are capable of meeting both sides of the argument. It’s not impossible to allow casuals to have a space and difficulty masochists to have one too.
I just desperately want games to have the ability to be for as many people as they can be and if you get pushed away from a game because of the difficulty I don’t think it’s a skill issue I think it’s often a game issue. Again, I’ve talked about that plenty, but I still believe it and will make it known.
All three games I’ve talked about are able to do this, they are capable of appealing to both sides of this debate. What they have to do is just ignore the vocal minority demanding the games be more hardcore, deriding casual players. Those people aren’t worth listening to.
I feel like some of this ended up being more of a rant than I anticipated. I am arguably more of a hardcore “gamer” (in quotes because I really hate the negative connotation that word has earned since GamerGate) that most out there, I play a fuck ton of games and I adore them. They’re my comfort. But I’m also a casual for some games, like Helldivers 2. I want to play games that I have fun with and if Helldivers 2 introduced more and more difficulty into the lower difficulties of the game then I, and my friends, would stop playing it. Arrowhead would have lost 4 casual players because of listening to the demands of the vocal minority. That would be depressing. So because of that, and of course the conversation I had with my partner that I mentioned at the top, I felt like I had to write this.
At the end of the day, what matters is returning players. No game should be the only game a person plays, and studios shouldn’t try to make their games that. Instead devs who have a big patch yearly or just are live service developers need to make a game that keeps people coming back even after they’ve left. You can always have people get hooked on your game and stick around, but if you can get a large amount of people who return and return even after months and months and months of not playing, that’s the real sign of a long lasting community. And casual players are who drive that. I mean just look at the longevity of WoW and Final Fantasy 14 for an example, people will continue to come back if you make something worthwhile.
What about you? Do you consider yourself casual? Do you agree with my points about how casuals are actually what drive live service games growth? Are you annoyed when live service games that you used to find comfort in introduce something that completely ruins the experience for you? If so tell me about it! I want to hear your thoughts on any of these questions and anything I said during my article.
Meow,
Cat
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