Few people with a PC haven’t clicked on “Solitaire” or “Minesweeper,” the embedded games in Windows. They’re not the sexiest games out there — the queen of hearts hardly holds a candle to Lara Croft — but they are infinitely playable; it’s easy to start playing them and occasionally impossible to stop. Unfortunately, for Microsoft, they’re free to play. But there are thousands of games in the category of these freebies — called “casual games” — that are not, and many companies are raking in enormous cash by offering them over the Internet to people not traditionally defined as gamers.
The definition of video game is always in flux, but the target audience for traditional vids from titans such as Sony and Microsoft remains the same: the 18- to 34-year-old male. That segment certainly has the coin to propel the gaming industry to incredible heights — $11 billion was spent on consoles, games and accessories such as joysticks in 2004.
But the industry’s laser focus on that specific gamer demographic has the potential to limit the growth gaming is capable of. That would be unhealthy, as game development budgets look to soar into the eight-figure range with the advent of next-gen consoles, starting with this fall’s Xbox 360.
Casual gaming offers digital entertainment to anybody outside (and sometimes within) that demographic.
“While today that population skews mostly female,” says Daniel Bernstein, president and CEO of Sandlot Games, whose hits include “Trade Winds,” “Slyder” and “Ballistik,” “I would say the casual gamer demographic is anyone other than the core gamer,” i.e., the 18- to 34-year-old male gamer.
Sandlot’s “Slyder” is indicative of the kind of experience casual gamers enjoy. Using only the arrow keys, gamers slide a gumdrop hero around a maze — avoiding pits and sharp-toothed baddies. The catch is you can move in only one direction at a time, and Slyder slides until he hits a surface.
The game has hundreds of levels, providing gamers with hours of playtime. And the price is certainly right. “Slyder” costs $20 (the industry’s magic bullet price point, which is considered an impulse buy) and offers tens of hours of play — compared with many $50 console games, which top out at 10 or 12 game hours to see everything.
Last year, casual games pulled in $600 million, with many analysts predicting that number to balloon to $2 billion by 2008. The budgets for casual games are investor-friendly, too, as the focus is on devising an addictive game play concept, not on developing massive cinematics or state-of-the-art graphics. Top casual games cost about $150,000 to make.
Numbers like this attract big fish — and none is bigger than Electronic Arts, which also runs its own casual games portal, called Pogo. Currently, 800,000 members pay $5 a month for access to a suite of games, such as “Poppit!” and “Turbo 21.” Pogo’s suite approach is similar to MSN’s casual games channel and Yahoo!’s games portal, which each host dozens of games and foster a community atmosphere in which gamers chat by typing messages back and forth and compare game rankings. Many of the scene’s biggest hits, though, such as PlayFirst’s “Diner Dash” and PopCap’s “Bejeweled” and “Zuma,” remain single-purchase games.
Bernstein compares the difference between casual games and traditional games to that between television and movies. Movies and traditional console are typical one-pass entertainment experiences, while casual games inspire repeat visits, like fans who check in weekly with their favorite TV programs.
Bernstein’s goal is to keep his casual fans from turning the channel.
