Industry guru Raph Koster has an opinion piece over at Gamasutra about the future of games for core gamers. Koster, the lead designer behind Ultima Online, sees the industry’s future as full of “lower-budget, asynchronous, low time investment, web-based games” emphasizing micro-transactions.

This future is geared not towards yesterday’s hardcore gamers, but to today’s market of casual gamers, of moms and gradmas and people who don’t follow daily gaming news in their RSS syndicator. They play Wii Fit and Wii Sports and ignore No More Heroes and Assassin’s Creed, games made for that small market of people who know and love games.

However, Koster’s conclusion is a positive one. He sees the mainstream, casual audience and the niche, hardcore one forming some sort of syncretism.

The mainstream will get tugged in the direction of the niche. As the world has become more science-fictional, we have seen the memes of SF appear in everyday life. Stuff from James Bond and Lord of the Rings is now common currency. The boundary lines between niche and mass market are very thin these days, and will likely get thinner. So even the casual stuff is going to have a heavy tinge of the stuff that we the geeks love.

Given the nature of games, I’d expect to see a continuation of the trend to complexify the casual, because that’s what games do: grow more complex as people master the basics. The high-end casual market isn’t very casual anymore (some match-3 games are not only expensive to make, but downright esoteric in their rules).

In other words — gamers may not want to become like Your Mom. But Your Mom is gradually becoming more of a gamer.

In my opinion, this is simply a sign that games are a healthy, growing medium. It is inevitable. Will it mean an end to complex games like Mass Effect that take story seriously? Only time will tell.