PS3 Waggling Away From The ‘Hardcore’ Stigma, Hopes Dev

In an interview with Develop, Jon Torrens, a designer on the PlayStation Move title TV Superstars, has explained that PlayStation game designers are hoping that the introduction of the Move will help shake the hardcore image off the PS3.

Torrens said that “the PS3 will become properly inclusive and people will think hardcore games and casual games all use one controller.” He continued: “There won’t just be casual gamers picking it up, but the hardcore gamers picking it up and realising we can all play together.”

In the same interview Elliot Martin, producer of SOCOM, describes how Move has influenced the longstanding PlayStation stalwart:

One of the things the team has always wanted to do is open the game experience up to other types of players’¦ [Playstation Move] allows the new SOCOM to be a game that genuinely appeals to a hardcore audience and the newer casual gamer who may have never have considered a title like SOCOM before.

Taking a look at the official page for TV Superstars, you can see that they’re really going “full casual” with this one. Continuing the work of the Eye Toy and Eye Pet, Sony certainly seems to be making a concerted effort to ‘œappeal to’ (pilfer) the ‘œcasual’ (Wii) market.

Where I think this particular title falls short is in the representation of ‘œhumans’ (and I really mean those quotation marks), and I can see over-thought games like this alienating rather than appealing to a market that’s already used to very clean, simple and unobtrusive graphics and game mechanics. Anyone in the world can look at a picture of Wii Sports‘ bowling and understand how it’s going to work, I’m still trying to work out how the revolutionary Move controller will work with the ‘œdead-faced-treadmill-speed-running’ mini-game.

It seems to me that the PS3 has done well for concentrating on individual hardcore IPs (Demon’s Souls, Uncharted, Killzone), and attracted a lot of gamers who want a more mature gaming environment, online and offline. It was the die-hards who forked out for the more expensive console to start with, by bringing everyone and their nan into games like SOCOM they could be doing more damage to their long-term user base than the fleeting interest of casual gamers will mitigate.