Right. I have some activities that are way more dubious than Candy Crush as to whether they are "video games".
For example I played Love Letter on Board Game Arena on Tuesday. Clearly if I played the "real" Love Letter that isn't a video game, it's a card game. So maybe playing it on BGA is still a card game, except the cards don't exist and I'm on a web site?
Sometimes on Tuesday I play Through The Ages. TTA was created as a board game, but obviously in the pandemic you can't safely go to somebody's house and sit around playing board games for hours. So there's a version that's a Steam game. Is that a video game? Or is that still just a board game I'm playing via Steam?
Sometimes we play D&D online instead. Is that a video game? Is it a video game if we're doing a 4th edition combat encounter, so that exact positions and movement matter? How about if it's a roleplayed skill check scenario instead?
Is an Infocom text adventure game a video game? How about a point-and-click like Monkey Island?
Is designing courses in Mario Maker 2 a video game?
Is writing Python code for my Compact Claustrophobia (Minecraft modpack) robot to more efficiently construct things for my play a video game?
These are things that require some clear fundamental idea of what video games are to guide principled decisions. Whereas Candy Crush is just obviously a video game.
If Candy Crush isn't a video game then I'm pretty sure arcade Space Invaders wasn't a video game either.
I'd argue that ultra-casual games like Candy Crush have so little in common with "core games" that it's not particularly useful to consider them the same thing.
A similar situation:
If I was discussing "board game culture" I think that most people would recognize that I'm referring the culture associated with games like Catan or Pandemic as opposed to people casually playing Tic Tac Toe.
No-one's talking about 'board game culture', though. This is about whether people play video games. If you were talking about the board games people play, Catan would be a barely visible blip; it'd be all about things like Monopoly. Now if you were talking about people who consider playing games part of their identity, I'd be inclined to agree (though there are edge cases; Pokemon Go falls into both 'casual game' and 'game that people get a bit weird about', for instance), but that's not at all what this survey is about.
EDIT: Also, well, media evolves. If you look at the sort of TV that's popular now, a lot of it is dramatically different to how it was in, say, the 80s and 90s. Someone who'd been in a coma since before Seinfeld came out would find modern sitcoms (with their lack of laugh tracks), and high production value dramas with multi-season story arcs (barely existed until this century), and reality shows, extremely weird. But they'd recognise that it was TV. And some 80s-style content still exists; it's just largely not what is popular right now.
My point is that "people who play video games" doesn't mean much if you define it so broadly that it includes both people who play primarily core games and people who play exclusively casual games.
From a business perspective, they are unlikely to be the same target market. Gaming related memes and similar cultural artifacts are unlikely to be shared. Etc.
It certainly means that if you're a video game making company, the market of potential customers is huge. That seems valuable.
This argument seems popular with people who like Very Serious Video Games, and are affronted by being associated with filthy casuals (the gamers, not the brand).
What potential customers, though? You wouldn't know whether they are 1% mobile games or 99% mobile games. Given that any company wouldn't "just make a game", this statistic isn't useful.
Similarly "all people eat food" isn't really helpful if you're wondering how large the market for artificial meat is.
I really dislike any attempt to draw a distinction between “casual” (a dismissive term) games from “core” games. This is pure gate keeping behavior; an attempt to diminish some games (and therefore their players) as being less real than others.
If you wish to separate “core” gamers, do it by device or by category, since that is much clearer and carries less of a value judgement.
