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Making A Fortune From Casual Games

Posted by Zonk on from the big-bucks-in-bobble dept.

hapwned writes "In yet another interesting article from the Escapist, Allen Varney has a piece on the ludicrous amount of money you can make from small, downloadable flash-type games that most Americans play. From the article: 'Which American designer personally made the most money last year from computer games he or she designed? Not the most money for a company, mind you, nor for a studio or licensor, but individual, take-home, taxable income. Was it a famous game god? John Carmack, Will Wright, Sid Meier, Warren Spector? Probably not. It was probably some guy you never heard of who wrote some little shareware game you never heard of. Those "casual games" - the puzzles and Mahjongg tilesets and card games and Breakout clones and match-three Bejeweled-type things - are downloaded, and sell, in numbers some game gods only dream about. Over the lengthy life of a successful casual game, the independent ("indie") designer can make serious, serious money - high six-figures and low sevens. Personally.'"

2 of 74 comments (clear)

  1. Not suprised by MBCook · · Score: 5, Interesting
    Makes sense to me for two reasons. First is that we all know how much money it takes to make a new Mario or Halo game. When you take a little game like the ones PopCap makes (my favorite place for such games) it's easy to see why that's true.

    But the bigger reason is accessability. My mom has purchased a couple of these games. They are simple, not twitched based (the ones she buys, she's not good at that kind of stuff), and easy for her to find and buy online. She can play them for a quick few minutes, or spend more than an hour playing them. In every way they are more accessible than a big console game.

    And these are basically the same kind of games a cell phone games which are also exploding (and what do you expect when many of them cost $5 A MONTH to play here in the US).

    I've tried my hand at it, and I intend to do it again. I'd love to be the next person to make a little game that goes BIG to become the next Bejeweled or Snood. My little game is on my website, and you just need Java 5 to play it, if you're interested.

    --
    Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
  2. Classic "Long Tail" play. by zentinal · · Score: 5, Interesting
    Sorry about using the currently overused new business / new economics buzzword, but this seems to me to be another variation on "The Long Tail" (see: Wired, Chris Anderson, Wikipedia), where you build a business based upon selling many different things with relatively low demand at relatively low volumes, instead of a small number of blockbusters at huge volume.

    While this makes horse-sense to me, I'd still like to see some numbers. There have to be some examples out there. I wonder if ringtone sales work the same way?