by [name redacted]
All day Tuesday, a board of twenty industry insiders swapped off on a series of panels dealing with the current state of the casual game industry. To start the proceedings, a selection of five speakers from a variegated spectrum of backgrounds outlined the basic nature of casual games, as they are today.
Unlike past years, the idea this time was to present an overall “übertheme”, broken down into digestible segments. That theme, roughly hewn, was a comparison of casual games now to where the industry was three years ago. On that note, since 2003, the industry has gone from about fifty million dollars in revenue, nearly all of which came from Internet downloads, to five times that sum in downloads alone; meanwhile, other revenue streams have become more important then before. There are now two annual conferences, dedicated to casual games. And even just as far as GDC representation, casual games have gone from a handful of sessions to over twenty related sessions, including this full-day tutorial.