According to a recent Forbes article, if you happen to fall into the definition of a "core" gamer (and you probably do just by virtue of reading this story), then you might as well get used to the fact that soccer moms and grandfathers now have more clout with the major game publishers than you do. That’s right, you’re being "nudged aside" so the market can make room for Cooking Mama and Buzz! games.

The piece starts with an interesting focus on The Sims, and that while the game was shunned by the hardcore community, the game and its expansions went on to sell over 100 million copies. The same thing happened to Spore, with core gamers dismissing it as too simplistic and not the "sim-everything" game they were expecting, all while the title easily surpassed 1 million in sales, largely on the back of casual gamers who spent hours making cute little monsters with the Creature Creator.

Disney Interactive’s Warren Spector supports the notion that hardcore gamers no longer shape the landscape, stating:

"At the risk of alienating all of the people who paid my mortgage all these years, they can’t be. We are in a commercial art form, which means you have to focus on the mainstream if you are playing in that game space."

So it seems that when it comes to gaming, publishers are content to snap up your money spent on titles like Gears of War 2 and Call of Duty: World at War and then turn around and put that same cash into financing the next Carnival Games. Forbes makes in interesting point though, and that is that it may be time for the core gamer to all but abandon major publishers and start seeking out specialty-minded indie studios who are continuing to create the hardcore titles we all know and love. So anybody out there got any suggestions? Maybe it’s time we all band together and find a new place to play. Yep, if they publishers don’t care about us anymore then we’ll just take our ball and go home.