casualities

February 14th, 2006, By Duncan Gough

Kim Pallister wraps up the recent Casuality conference with a host of links to Tom Hume.

It’s true that the event did feel quite US-centric in places (not always a bad thing, of course) as well as being very developer-centric. A lot of people there seemed to be sizing up casual games in relation to hardcore games and there is still a split between casual games and indie games. There were a few indie developers in the audience who unsure of how to react to a lot of the this is how to build a casual game advice. Alice picked up on a lot of the negativity that, I think, was caused by the indie/casual gamer divide – I got the impression that a lot of indie developers just didn’t want to hear how about low conversion rates, clones and, frankly, middle aged women.

In particular, there were sections of the conference that caused me to mentally flick back through my blog archives and compare notes. Like this;

How willl players react to in-game advertising? With NoAd patches.

Women in games? It’s true, they exist.

The focus of 2006 is community? Here’s how to create a guaranteed multiplayer experience.

The Xbox360, PSP and DS? Do they spell the end for PC gaming?

Casual games? How to design them, what subjects should they tackle and what do they look like?

I’d just like to re-iterate that last point as it struck me as the most important piece of advice that casualities had to offer, one that repetition can do no harm to. If you’re building a Casual Game, here is what your audience looks like. Don’t trust the statistics, don’t trust the advice from the big companies. Don’t listen to any of that if you don’t want to. Just go look at the pictures, read the bio’s. That’s what casual gamers look like. If your game doesn’t appeal to them in some way, you need to re-think your approach.

What defines a Casual Game and what defines a Casual Gamer is something that came up time and again during the conference. I’m put money on the same PowerPoint slides being used again and again over the next couple of years too. There seemed to be a large number of developers who weren’t very comfortable with the idea that casaul gamers didn’t include themselves. There was a great quote at the start of the conference (apologies to whoever it was I’m no doubt about to mis-quote) when the question of what makes a casual gamer was asked.

(Casual games) are largely anyone who isn’t male aged 18 to 25.

With regards to the rest of the conference, the real star of the show (for me) was Eric Bethke of GoPets. The Korean ‘item model’ was of huge interest to a lot of people there and Eric seemed to be the only person with any real first hand experience of it. A lot of the panels he took part on soon veered toward his discussion of how the item-based model came to be. Software piracy is a massive problem in Korea, so software sales and try/buy games won’t work. Hardware sales are still high, but software sales are very low, so piracy clearly fills the gap. The item-based model is much harder to pirate, so it is a viable business model. The item-based model also has to be built from the ground up – bolting it on to a game like World of Warcraft just won’t work. As Eric said, one is communism, the other is democracy. Botling democracy (the item-based model) onto a communism (like Wow) is always going to be a mess.

More of Eric’s thoughts about the Korean model are transcribed here (thanks Tom!) However, here are a few of the best:

Regarding the free-to-play, pay-for-items mode:

There was a phase in Korea when everyone had avatars you dress up. That lasted about 9 months before players noticed it had no effect on gameplay. Temporary gameplay-affecting items are the ones which make the most money.

Regarding the sale of items in a virtual world, i.e. support gifting and don’t force users to sell via eBay, build your own marketplace:

The initial approach is to make items non-transferable and perishable. This works for a little bit if you’re the first mover. If they paid for something from you, they’ve bought it, and should be able to sell it. Don’t be arrogant and insist they buy only from you.

Regarding the success of the item-based model itself:

The item business model is the most efficient I know of: players get to spend what they want to spend. This will happen to every market. The idea that you pay a fixed price for your content will die: we don’t do this almost anywhere else in our lives.

Elsewhere, there was a fun Hype vs. Real deal session that resulted in the admission that big portals don’t encourage community features in games since they don’t want their customers talking to other customers on a different portal. Along with the statement that ‘this begs for an open source API’, Bunchball seemed to loom large over our heads. Again, a lot of the discussion at the conference was about MMO’s, when it wasn’t about what makes a casual game(r). Whilst it was generally agreed that an MMORPG combined with a Casual Game would be big (the proverbial MCO, Massively Casual Online game that I’ve been harping on about for a while now), not once did anyone mention Puzzle Pirates. There’s no ‘if’ or ‘when’ regarding MCOs, Puzzle Pirates is living proof that Casual Games work in a permanent virtual world. Get down into the belly of your pirate ship and solve a few rounds of match-three style goodness to get the bilge pump working at full speed and you’ll see what I mean!

Finally, there was a lot of ‘community, community, community’ style admissions with regards to what 2006 holds for Casual Games. Yahoo in particular seemed keen to tie games into their web services, which is great news. I keep finding comparisons that can be drawn between the Web2.0 hype and the Casual Games hype and community is the shared currency. There was some more speculation about the Xbox360 and LiveArcade as a viable distribution system too. Even though there will continue to be news items like this one about Marble Blast breaking into the Top 10 most played games list, the suggestion that Xbox360 is a Casaul Games platform was treated with some disdain. To steal another great quote (apologies in advance), ‘you can downgrade a hardcore gamer to a Casual Gamer for a couple of hours with Xbox360, but you can’t upgrade a Casaul Gamer to a hardcore, Xbox360 owner’, which is exactly why the Xbox 360 is not a Casual Games platform. I’m sure that, once more and more good games come out for the Xbox 360 we’ll see less of the Flash shooters and puzzles featuring and being played by 360 owners.

So, casuality europe was a huge success. Well done and thank you to all involved. If you’re thinking about going to casaulity seattle I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend it.

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