Everyone Loves Casual Games

James Gwertzman of casual games developer PopCap, has written a feature about casual gaming's growth for Gamasutra. The casual games industry has been growing bigger and bigger in recent years, and can be hugely profitable. They must be, if Microsoft is putting so much effort into getting them on its console. It's getting a bit crowded, though, which probably has a lot to do with how low the barrier of entry is in terms of cost and development time. One course of action frequently considered among large-scale developers when the "main" games industry proves too unprofitable or grueling is to try out casual games. According to Gwertzman, that's been happening, which makes the whole scene even more competitive. Despite that influx of outside talent, Gwertzman points out that the core value of casual gaming remain the same: emphasis on fun above all else. Production values only go so far with these sorts of games; if the gameplay isn't solid and addictive, people won't play.

"We really obsess over the core game mechanics. In a game like Bejeweled, hardcore developers look at that and might think it's kind of...it's very easy to kind of dismiss it, but we literally spent weeks on just the right way for the gems to fall when you make a match. In a game like that, it's little details like that. How does it feel? Getting those little details right is what we prioritize. So when we're designing a new game, we'll spend months and months prototyping core mechanics."

Interestingly, business analysts have noted recently that the big mainstream publishers of the gaming world--EA, Ubisoft, Activision, and so on--don't tend to do very well in the casual and mobile markets, where existing franchises, movie licenses, and cinematic visuals can't easily be leveraged to sell games. It's been smaller companies like PopCap in the casual market and Jamdat in the mobile market that have succeeded. Companies like EA have been unable to make headway with those kinds of games. Of course, "We could build it over time...[but] we prefer to be No. 1," said EA CEO Larry Probst, so his company just bought Jamdat for $680M. Of course, many now expect EA's rival publishers to attempt similar buy-ins to that market. With all of these development, it looks like casual and core gaming are colliding. With Xbox Live Arcade, there are certainly a lot of hardcore gamers who are playing more casual games than they used to. And will there now be casual gamers who become familiar with the EA name and seek to branch out into the company's full console and PC offerings? Casual game developers generally seem to enjoy their isolation from the core games industry, but that may not last forever.