I may not play a lot of Rockstar games, but there is one thing which their president, Sam Houser, and I agree on: We don’t really get the whole division between “casual” and “hardcore” or “core” games.
The division doesn’t make sense to us; good games will usually sell and be popular, bad games will struggle – of any type or genre or style. But we still believe big, high impact games will help the industry evolve and further surpass the movie industry as the next mass-market story telling medium.
Even with a title as “hardcore” as one might consider Grand Theft Auto IV to be, Rockstar tries to take into account the new people coming into the mix.
We always tried to make games that anyone could pick up and play. They may, over time, reveal a lot of structural and mechanical complexity, but the first mission of more or less any Rockstar game is very easy and engaging for a reason – because new people playing the game have to be gently led into the world of 3D action games, or open world racing games or whatever. This is the way we try to cater for a mass market – but we are focused on making digital worlds that are fun to explore and interlaced with rich narratives, that even the most casual player can become a part of, if they want to. The challenge is to make a game in which ‘depth’ does not result in complexity the first minutes you play. This is a challenge we’ve always tried to embrace, and I hope we are getting better at it, just as I hope we are getting better at everything.
With that in mind, Rockstar plans to move forward by “doing what they’ve always done,” which is making games they want to play, and hoping there is an audience for them.
We don’t believe in focus testing ideas (it’s like asking an audience what album they want to hear – they don’t know until they hear it!) or thinking of a target market or anything like that; it’s an anathema to creativity. We are trying to make commercially viable art, not sell washing powder. — Rockstar President Sam Houser to Develop Magazine
