The Eight Gaming Personas

No longer are gamers just “hardcore” or “casual”

For many years, gamers were just people who played games, differentiated mostly by what system they used to enjoy their hobby. The true “hardcore” gamers played on PC, the realm of flight simulators, grand strategy titles, and classic Sierra-style point-and-click adventure games. Everyone else played on consoles like Atari or Nintendo where bouncy platformers and adventure games ruled the day. Fast forward to the Nintendo Wii where the idea of the “casual” gamer really took off, denoting people like your neighbors and grandparents who had never played games before but could suddenly wrap their minds around Wii’s intuitive motion controls.

For years things stood, either hardcore or casual, static and unchanging while the industry itself changed drastically. The tidal wave of cell phone ubiquity and app-gaming led to the ‘super casual’ moniker, but that was really the only addition. As the calendar crept toward the second half of the 2010s though, the ability to gather data from consumers increased. The craving for advanced analytics and understanding consumers, with an eye toward selling them more of everything, has swept across multiple industries. Gaming has exploded as a hobby and an industry, growing to be worth over $160 billion in 2020, and the stakeholders naturally screamed for better…