The Importance of Hardcore Gamers

By saying hardcore, I do not include those e-peens who pretend they are hardcore with a condescending attitudes.

A game with depth needs hardcore gamers to make it shine, like good chess games need hardcore players.

Hardcore gamers have mindset to explore and analyze the game with their amateur/professional skills and thus create theorycrafting, strategies, guides, interesting walkthrough, and mods in some games.

With 2 conditions:
(1) The game must have depth.
(2) The hardcore gamers are interested in the game.

Nowadays, many game manufacturers start to aim on the casual gamers market, obviously, that market is much more profitable because hardcore gamers are the minority. However, this should not become an excuse to create a soulless game.

The recent examples are Command and Conquer 4, Final Fantasy XIII, Final Fantasy XIV and Civilization V. They are considered "good" games from certain point of view, but these beautiful games are starting to drive hardcore gamers away because they do not provide a deep game mechanism and content for exploration and analysis (the more they analyze, the more they find flaws of design).

Command and Conquer 4
I don't want to mention this game a lot here, as it is a shame of the series. EA is a soulless company which create popcorn games ($$).

Popcorn games: Games which were designed for few hours gameplay and thus never meant to be classic at all. (A lot of rich gamers buy this idea)

Final Fantasy Series
The re-playability of Final Fantasy Series has been reduced to absurd level since Final Fantasy X, high re-playability was one of the key elements in previous series but they are forever gone, as the company decided pretty cutscenes are more important than content and gameplay, and suit the gamers from popcorn era.

Civilization V
This is the first Civilization game which I cannot get the "Just one more turn" feeling (Civ fans know exactly what I am talking about here).

The game shows its shallow design after the fog of beauty starts to fade.
Read Sulla's Explanation if you are interested

Consequences of Hardcore Gamers' Departure
As those are the gamers who love to use their brain, once they leave the games, other gamers will not have MODS, ADDONS, GUIDES, STRATEGIES, and then the games will be left in the dust after hours of play, and no one would ever remember them again. (marketing may help them to last for a longer period)