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2006 Casual Games White Paper

Posted by Zonk on from the casual-gaming-under-the-microscope dept.

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."

1 of 15 comments (clear)

  1. Casual Games definition by Dubane · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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 casual game players who will go for many hours at a time.

    On some levels even games like WoW have aspects that are extremely casual. It's very easy to get into, they do a great job of holding your hand, and you can with some success play the game in relatively short play sessions (though you can't get to level 60!)

    In the end, the definition we are using I think is the most appropriate one we have, but as we point out in the paper, it's still pretty flawed. Anytime you have this nebulous of a definition there's going to be edge cases, and things that possibly fit, and others that don't. It actually took several years before we even found a name for this aspect of the game industry, and in the end it's one that most people aren't happy with, but don't have a better suggestion.