Casuality Amsterdam
February 12th, 2006, By Duncan Gough
Back from the casuality conference in Amsterdam with Tom and Colin from 3RD sense. In particular, fellow 3RD sense mogul Colin Cardwell continued his 100% Casual Games speaking record and hosted a great session on Distributing and Marketing to a World Wide Audience, renamed Fluffy Bunnies Share With Their Friends Around The World to better fit the mostly female casual games demographic.
Whilst there I had the chance to meet up with plenty of people, particularly Flo and Uli from Neodelight, Matt and Heather from Nitrome, the guys from Codemasters/Funsta as well as representatives from Zylom, Real Arcade, EA, Garage Games and Game Trust, among others.
Strikingly, the conference was also noticable for who didn’t attend. Not that I’m going to name names though.
Kim Pallister has a couple of posts about the conference too, Casuality Europe notes (in which you can see me in the second photograph if you look clearly enough) and Casuality Session.
For a European conference, there wasn’t a clear line on some issues that came to the fore, like payments systems and localisation (in general, support all payment systems despite the hassle, localise where-ever possible seemed to be the european view). The conference also gave me a lingering idea about America being a freakish market. Try/buy games are huge over there and that’s mainly down to two factors. Firstly, that everyone speaks the same language, reducing the need for localisation. Secondly, that everyone is comfortable using credit cards online, reducing the need to support multiple, convoluted payment systems. America is freakish in that respect, which seemed at odds to general message of ‘Europe, payment systems and localisation is a pain’ sent out by a number of companies.
There is nowhere in Europe that a similar market exists. The UK is close but nowhere near as big in terms of sheer numbers. It’s also why a lot of the American companies are happy to live with conversion rates of 1 or 2% of download trials resulting in purchases. Their approach is very much ‘we haven’t hit the wall yet’, so don’t worry about low conversion rates when there are millions of people who have yet to test out a try/buy game. I’m naturally cautious (as were a vocal few in the audience, it would seem), so this approach jars with me somewhat. Not least because they were talking about the audience in terms of pure numbers, as a ’space’ to be ‘exploited’. All of which is a far cry from ‘flogging goods’ to the ‘punters’ as we Brits lovingly call them.
Whilst away, I missed the PHP London conference (which appears to have been no great loss) and the Carson Future of Web apps summit. As is the way of these things, there’s a great quote from Tom Coates (via Tim O’Reilly) that is very applicable to Casual Games right now:
Whilst the above quote is given in regards to Web 2.0, it’s also true of Casual Games since original ideas, game mechanics and distribution methods are all in short supply at the moment. The industry of casual game clones is growing, meaning that original IP is turning into a land-grab of core ideas. That is, replace ‘locations, identity, calendaring’ with ‘match-three, virtual pets, mmo’s’ and you’ll see why I returned from casuality and connected to the two.
More to come, when I find my notepad and recover from the initial ‘did we really book this hotel’ shock.