It's A Casual Gaming FRENZY!

Several news snippets in the past few days are pointing towards the fact that the casual games market is starting to be perceived as the place to be - and the place to be seen.  At least by companies which do not have their heads so far up a camel's backend that they cannot see the light (albeit an exquisitely rendered camel, made up of over 9,000,000 individual polygons, capable of well over 60fps complete with all sorts of motion blur, high dynamic range lighting and err, so on...)

- Iplay, who are now part of the Oberon casual gaming behemoth are launching 11 new games from Oberon's casual portfolio, including Hexic and Mozaki Blocks.

- Apple's new range of iPods have new higher resolution screens and are designed for gaming

- Take 2 announced that they are creating a dedicated casual gaming 'label' and have already signed a deal with Nickelodeon for several brands

- US retailer GameStop announced that it would be targeting users outside the 'core gaming demographic' in it's marketing and customer service strategies.  In other words 'we need the casual market...'

- Cobra Mobile launched it's own casual gaming portal www.cobimobi.com

- Denki  launched Shrek The Third it's 56th (or so) casual games title for Digital Interactive TV, on Sky in the UK

- Slam's casual label Joyboost is pulling in very nice reviews for it's female oriented casual title Orchidia

- Valve, the company behind Half Life has let slip that gamers pre-ordering their 'Orange Box' pack of new titles (including HL2 Ep 2, Team Fortress 2 and Portal amongst others) will also get a Half Life themed 'extreme' version of casual game 'Peggle'.  Weird but very cool.  A 'real' developer offering a 'casual' game as an incentive to (we assume) 'real' gamers.

Hmmm...

Yet, despite all of these good things, there remain huge swathes of the games market which remain absolutely steadfast in their belief that 'casual games' are not 'real games' and are not worthy of attention or consideration by 'real' developers.

While SG.biz shuns such fools, it remains an interesting question why so many otherwise smart companies are so threatened by this new area?

Comments

[Andrew]

Im not a big fan of mobile games i would maybe buy one if i had enough money but i prefer console games alot more, and i dont think there is much of a future for these kind of games.