Casual Games, Slight Return
May 31st, 2006, By Duncan Gough
Now that we know what shape the three main consoles will look like, where does that leave Casual Games and the gamers who play them?
Clearly, neither the Xbox360 nor the PS3 is aimed at Casual Gamers. Both are purporting to offer classic games from their own back catalogue as a nod to the casual games market, but in doing so they miss the point of casual gamers altogether. As I’ve mentioned before, no casual gamer is going to buy a console specifically for games because casual gamers don’t have that sort of money, don’t think of themselves as games, don’t see the Xbox360 or PS3 as a casual games device and have a much better deal when it comes to downloading casual games onto their home or work PC. Which is, after all, a multifunction device that lets them check email, browse the web, chat, upload photo’s, and so on. And it’s that last point that is key, a PC or Mac at home is really still seen as an office purchase, so the initial expense can be justified as such.
On top of all of this is the ’shopping cart’ experience that casual gamers have at the moment. It’s more of a free buffet, to tell you the truth. Every casual game launched across the major portals has a free, time-limited, downloadable trial. Developers moan about these free trials since the conversion rates, that is to say, the number of times someone pays for the full version of a game they have already downloaded versus the number of people who do not, are notoriously low. Around one to two percent. However, this is the Casual Games market. This ‘free trial’ ethos is how it all got started and this is pretty much how the market remains today. At the end of the last dot-com bust, when being free and on-line was good but not good enough to make any profit, the try-buy model was born as a method of generating revenue for small, often indie games, that used the internet for distribution. Since then, the market has grown and reached the encouraging position within which it currently resides.
So, looking forward slighty, to the end of E3, where will Casual Games be? There is a panel at E3 on the Korean Item Model, of free games that generate revenue from in-game purchases, but that’s the closest thing to a nod that Casual Games seem set to get from the biggest games conference this year. Until casuality seattle, that is.
Now that Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo have put their cards on the table, now that it is clear how the next few years will turn out (much like the last few), there seems to be a huge opening for Casual Games to start making up some serious ground. Of all the consoles, the Wii is clearly the only one that can appeal to the same people as Casual Games do. But, again, the people who make the casual games industry tick over, those 1 – 2% who pay for the full versions of games they have already donwloaded and trialled, are not going to pay all that money for a console.
Perhaps, then, it’s time to look at what Casual Games can do to increase their appeal, to make the most of this opening. There are three clear areas in which Casual Games can make inroads on console and hardcore PC games, starting with the most customer-friendly positive of all, try/buy.
The try/buy model is customer led, it was designed to get people back online and used to paying for content again. What’s more, it works. As much as people would rather pay for physical items than just software (atoms vs. bits), Casual Games have made that work. Not in a massively successful way, but in a respectable way. As a consumer, the try/buy model lets you download any number of top-quality games, all of which weigh in at around 10 – 20 MB, in exchange for nothing more than an email address. You could conceivable download all of the Top 10 games at bigfishgames.com or games.yahoo.com for no cost at all. Next month, when you’ve finished playing them all, you can do the same thing all over again.
On top of all of this, there are some clever pseudo-DRM style code wrappers that provide games developers with plenty of information about the lifetime of their games. Specifically, the wrapper from trymedia is ingenious, providing security and statistics (both of which are vital to small casual games developers) at the same time. Again, this is by design. Since the Casual Games market grew up around the try/buy idiom, viral content and small downloads were key. However, popular viral content is liable to be emailed amongst friends and it would only take one friend to buy the full version for it to be spread to each friend for free. As the Casual Games market has grown, the need for reporting tools like trymedia system have sprung up. Had the casual games market appeared out of nowhere, adding in these tools would have been awkward and most likely poorly received. Since the casual games market has grown at a steady rate, however, tools like these have grown up alongside them.
Secondly, casual games are cross-platform. The majority of downloadable casual games are routinely available for both PC and Mac. On top of that, advergames which are traditionally flash based, have something approaching a 99% user install base.
Thirdly, the item model. The practice of creating a free-to-play game that generates revenue through the sale of in-game enhancements. It can only work in casual games, not in ‘grown up’ mmorpgs, since they require subscriptions and purchase fees, which actively works against the item model from the outset. The item model increasingly looks like a viable business plan for anyone developing a casual game, especially given its populist, ‘free’ backing, and that it won’t gain as much traction in an already-paid-for game and is perfectly suited to
This C|net article about Casual Games touches on many of the same points I’ve made here. Stating, for example, that “One of the nice things about casual games, he said, is they tend to have natural breaks, like television shows, where commercials are less disruptive than say, halting a live-action game”, which I’ve never heard mention of before, but will definitely consider in the future. The article also mentions the vast difference between the cost of mainstream games and the cost of casual games. Developing mainstream games required a large staff and a massive budget. Developing casual games costs a fraction of that. Furthermore, buying a mainstream game costs around £40 a time, whereas buying a casual game again costs a fraction of that.
All of which makes me believe that casual games have a great opportunity to make serious inroads on mainstream gaming. And, as seems to be the way at the moment, if the West doesn’t make a start, Korea will.