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2006 Casual Games White Paper

Posted by Zonk on Mon Jul 03, 2006 05:17 PM
from the casual-gaming-under-the-microscope dept.
Entertainment Games
Dubane writes "The 2006 Casual Games White Paper (pdf) has just been released by the IGDA Casual Games SIG. The 116-page report was contributed to by nearly 40 professionals in the casual gaming space, spanning all aspects of the industry, including developers, publishers, portals, tool providers and more. Notable updates from last year are the Business Models section with up to date information on how casual game companies are making money today, and the Publishing section which contains results from a publishing survey of over 50 players in space. These results provide information how companies earn their revenue, what genres of games perform the best, and typical royalty rates seen for the various players in the space (among other things). This year's paper is also available on the IGDA wiki where it can be continuously updated by the community."
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  • Any ideas on what is really coming up next from this?
    • What's next? The 2007 Casual Game's White Paper.
      • Hehe maybe :) Seriously though, one of the goals we have with the wiki is for the main information to be continuously updated, so there might not be a need for another large-scale paper like this. We may move onto much smaller reports on more targeted areas of the space such as designing for upsell, production issues, skill-based gaming, etc.
  • It's a bit dissapointing that your standard Bejeweled and Holdem clones are still apparently dominating the marketplace. Where indie development was said to be a dream of innovation and creativity, it really looks more like yet more connect-4 and royal flushes.
  • I never dressed up for gaming anyway, I just never saw the point of trying to fit in with all those phonies.
  • Casual Gamnes seems like another loosely defined market sector, that's nothing really but a buzz word used by corporations to prop up their stocks. The genre is so broad they create an illusion of an ever expending market by stretching the definition of casual games. At first it may be just puzzle java games, with know player base of x. Next month they decide to also include non-puzzle java games with player base of y. X + y = x, and they can say that x grew by a percent value of z. This creates illusion of
    • The thing that bugs me is the different ways to take "casual." They're defining a "casual game" as one with "simple controls" that doesn't require a long-term commitment. But there are so many different ways to interpret that. And what's simple to one gamer might not be so easy for another. I think what they're really getting at is "entry-level gaming," meaning a game that a non-gamer can pick up and play with minimal instruction and/or a knowledge of whatever pre-existing game or skill it might be base

    • In a lot of ways you are right. Casual Games is an extremely hard to define term. We took a shot at it again this year, but the reality is that I don't think we'll ever see a full and complete defition of casual games. Some people like to define them by their player-base (ie Soccer Moms), but that's flawed because there's many other types of people playing casual games. Even if you expand the definition to people that play in short bursts of time it isn't right, because you have some extremely hardcore casu

    • "Easy to learn, difficult to master".

      That's the official Casual Games definition. It's not applicable to gaming casually, to blowing off steam on the Xbox360 [suttree.com] or to playing old-school classics using MAME. Casual Gamers are a very tighly defined bunch and Casual Games are almost exclusively aimed at Windows downloaded, try-before-you-buy, 2D pick-up-and-go style games.

      Personally, I find actually 'looking at' what consititues a Casual Gamer [suttree.com] makes it easier to define them as a bunch.
  • I am on page 20 of 116, and already my eyes are watering from the spelling and style errors, the triviality, the blah-blah, the self-importance, the silly distinctions, and the senseless charts. I mean, who the hell shows a half-page pie-chart of the hours spent on gaming per week, with the whole pie representing 24 hours? That is just meaningless.
      • Ah well, I went through the whole document and almost all of the charts are senseless. I mean, who uses a line graph when there is no sequence? Who uses a spider-web graph when there IS a sequence (without loopback)? I can't say I read all of the texts, but I read quite a few, and my general impression is "much ado about nothing". The sad thing is that the few wise words which are undoubtly in there (which wiki hasn't got those?) are embedded in a big pile of self-promotion and people trying to sound import

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