Daily Archives: Wednesday, February 20th, 2008

GameLab’s Zimmerman Says Casual Games are Dead (Sort Of)

  • Reading time:1 mins read

by [name redacted]

You can’t make money making casual games, Zimmerman said. It’s a broken business model for developers, with low royalties, a ton of middlemen, a high turnover of software, a hugely saturated market, and ever-increasing production values, therefore production cost. Finally, now that the casual industry is no longer just a little club in a back room, the “big boys” like EA have shouldered their way in, driving independent developers ever more to the periphery.

On the creative end, “Casual games began with a promise.” They were meant to be a meritocracy, Zimmerman said; smaller in scope, and therefore more conducive to experimentation than big-budget mainstream games. Instead, the field has “almost become a parody of itself… The degree of shameless clones seems, to my eye, to be more prevalent than other sectors of the game industry… I’m not seeing that innovation is rewarded.”

( Continue reading at GamaSutra )

The Changing Face of Casual Games

  • Reading time:1 mins read

by [name redacted]

The prime message for the Casual Games Summit this year is that the casual game market is expanding so much, trickling over into so many demographics, that the old, rather lazy ways of thinking about the format and its audience have begun to stifle the potential of casual games, and turn them into a bit of a mockery of themselves.

The target audience, declared Microsoft Casual Games’ Chris Early, is no longer the stereotypical soccer mom. “Everyone’s playing casual games now, and they’re playing them in places we never thought they’d play them before.” Everyone who works with a computer is now either a customer or a customer in the making. So the big new question is, “who are you going to design your game for?”

( Continue reading at GamaSutra )