Will Free Games kill hardcore gaming?

A couple of years ago, games targeted at non-gamers were not percieved to be a threat to the

conventional online gaming business.

But with the advent of Nintendo Wii  a console oriented at non-gamers  has slowly but surely

beating the competition among its rivals (Microsoft's Xbox 360 and Sony's PlayStation 3) in sales,

something the gaming companies have to seriously think about.

This has proved that there's a huge market for non-gamers who want fun, user-friendly and

non-complicated gaming experiences to pass their free (or work) time.

Basically, anyone with the correct skills and software can make anything (although limited to a 2D

environment) in the free online gaming world. Now you can see hundreds of remakes of old classics,

from Mario to Sonic, from Tetris to totally new mixes of games, spawning new mind-bending genres that have thousands of people glued

to their Pcs, thereby ignoring their work.

One particular genre (or game type, whatever) has a particularly interesting story. It's called Tower

Defense that many gamers refer to a form of cybersports on its own. The idea is that you have a base, a

path and a selection of units. You have to build these units  or towers  around the path. The path

starts off-screen and leads to your base. You have to carefully place your units around the path in

order to kill all the enemies that use it to get to your base. There is a lot of financial strategy involved,

as well as quick reaction times and careful planning.

What's interesting about this genre is its origin. The roots lead to a game called Warcraft 3 by Blizzard

entertainment. That game allowed you to make custom maps, and one of the examples provided by

Blizzard was a Tower Defense game. It didn't take too long for lots of variations to appear, thus

resulting in a very popular modification to the initial gameplay scheme. It was fun, simple and

entertaining. The key to it was the multiplayer aspect and the simplicity of it. Any player  even with a

fairly low skill level  could easily go ahead and compete (or co-op) with the best players on the map.

This was a long fad in Warcraft 3, but eventually ended up getting flash treatment and became a

popular free games genre that thousands of people enjoy today.

At the same time, there were vice-versa stories. A game called Alien Hommid originated as a flash game

and was picked up by Microsoft  and is now available for download as a paid Xbox Live Arcade game.

While free games most likely won't kill the hardcore gaming

market, they have certainly taken a huge chunk of market share of the gaming business. Let's just hope

that they won't take it over entirely.

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