Bunch of interest around casual gaming these days: casual games are web-based or downloadable (or even mobile) games which have a small size, and are used by enthusiasts, not necessarily hardcore games. These are generally simple-to-play, short-duration games that are graphically unsophisticated and will represent about $250 million a year in sales this year.
Among the distributors in this market include RealNetworks (with RealArcade), AtomShockwave, Yahoo, and AOL, among others.
Microsoft is stepping up its activity in the market..Chris Early, a game-industry veteran, joined the company this year to head up the “Casual Games group” within the company. The group is involved in creating and publishing games for MSN Games, Xbox Live Arcade, Windows OS casual games, MSN Messenger and Microsoft Mobile games.
NYT wrote this story recently about the casual games market.
Earlier this week, the first Casual Games Conference happened, and a bunch of activity out of it. Fuel Games Blog has a couple og good write ups about the conference: Day 1 and Day 2 .
Also announced at the conference: the International Game Developers Association has formed a Casual Game Special Interest Group, and has released a monster 125-page report on market.
(
) Download the report from here (PDF link)…
On a related note, former Listen.com CEO (Rhapsody, now owned by RealNetworks) Sean Ryan has started a blog, called SharkJumping, where he writes about the casual games market (His new company Donnerwood bought out Tringo, a small adjunct to the virtual world game SecondLife). His report from the Casual Games Conference
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