Suttree.com: Casual Games, Social Software by Duncan Gough

Steam

Steam is on a lot of PCs, running in the background. It’s almost a Push technology.

Since Steam makes one-click game purchasing a viable concept for PC owners, it follows that the Casual Games ‘try before you buy’ model will translate its’ success fairly seamlessly. In fact, there’s an argument to say that not having to enter your card details in a web browser may even persuade more people to pay for full versions of these Casual Games.

Steam is also an excellent stats package. These are the stats for Half Life 2: Episode One, just imagine what the stats are going to look like for a bunch of PopCap games.

On top of this, The Item Model provides a neat way for casual game developers to create a new revenue stream from their content. The Item Model provides a fairly consistent way of encouraging users to pay for game content since it’s available throughout the lifetime of the game. Compared to a flat-fee, which means the game developer gets one payment in return for a complete access to the game, the Item Model (also known as freemium) opens up the possibility of dedicated users buying game content for as long as they play it.

XNA

Are consoles reviving PC gaming? Not just by highlighting it’s flexibility compared to all-in-one, closed box consoles, but by reversing the game developement process from consoles into PCs. This is possible using the new XNA system.

XNA is closely tied to the Torque 2D engine, something I’ve had on my to-do list for too long. When I said that Microsoft were reversing their casual games unit into retail stores, I also claimed that they didn’t seem to know what they were doing. Given the XNA annoucement, I’m beginning to think I was very wrong. It looks like Microsoft are playing a very successful game of ‘wait-and-see’. By watching the fortunes of the Nintendo DS and the Sony PSP, they’ve clearly seen a high and substantiated demand for casual games and homebrew, classic games. Just as they did with the original Xbox, by making Video Gaming accessible and less nerdy, they’re threatening to do again with Casual Games.

It’s not a very difficult formula to follow, either. Classic games are retro. Retro stuff is cool with teenagers, young adults and those of us old enough to remember them the first time around. That’s a large audience with a fair degree of disposable income. Opening up the Xbox360 for homebrew games, albeit in a limited fashion at first, looks increasingly like a conscious step away from the proprietary nature of the DS and PSP.

From a developers point of view, this affects the programming langueges quite significatly. Just as the new Intel Macs are the only computers that can run Windows and OSX, C# is now the only language that can write casual games for PC and Xbox360. That’s a huge advantage for Microsoft, despite the negativity as plenty of others have pointed out.

So, does this mean that I can transfer my prediction for skill gaming on the Xbox360 to skill gaming via Steam? To recap, the pay-for-points system that the next-gen consoles are promoting, including the Xbox360, are perfectly suited to pay-to-play games. Seeing how big online gambling is, a casual game of poker, mah-jong or solitaire against other gamers for a few wagered tokens would be a money spinner. Is Microsoft setup up tournaments and charged an nominal entrance fee, you could almost guarantee a profit. It’s just a question of whether they want to be seen as a ‘gaming’ company, rather than a ‘games’ company.

Casual Games

So, in conclusion, there are interesting things continuing to happen in Casual Games. Does the XNA annoucement signify the start of casual games middleware? There have been a couple of small starts recently, a couple of casual game specific ad companies, is this the industry growing up?