Casual Games 2.0

October 25th, 2006, By Duncan Gough

As recently as yesterday I was highlighting the fact that casual games and online games haven’t picked up on the prevailing Web 2.0 hype. As much as Web 2.0 may turn out to be nothing but hype, it’s still curious to see online gaming shun so many of the social hooks that have driven the latest generation of websites.

There is, of course, Millions of games but aside from that one example the next generation of games websites seem to have been a long way off. However, over the last couple of weeks I’ve become aware of two websites that look like changing this.

bagunk

The first, bagunk shares a lot of features with Millions of games. It is a bookmarking application for web games but with two clear differences – a) tours and b) high scores.

Tours on bagunk are a great way of collating related games together. For a bookmarking website this is a clever idea that lets users create short lists of their favourite games – making sense of the vast number of different items that will no doubt end up bookmarked in the website. By creating tours, users can share their favourite games rather than just rating individual games and users can, in effect, tutor other people. It’s a neat idea and one that really sets bagunk apart.

High scores on bagunk seem to be an upcoming feature, but one that again differentiates them from other websites. If social bookmarking is a proven idea for sharing individual games, then social bookmarking of scores has the potential to turn bagunk into a very useful repository of achievements. Getting enough developers on board is going to be the hard part, though, but if social bookmarking is Web 2.0’s gift to websites, then maybe social scoring is Web 2.0’s gift to gamers.

Kongregate

The second website, kongregate, looks equally as ambitious and well designed. As their website states – “Kongregate is a casual-games start-up dedicated to creating an infectious community site for players and developers.” Having been lucky enough to be part of the alpha test, I can assure you that Kongregate has all the right tools to become a great community of games. It’s very much a ‘YouTube of games’, with some very clever ideas to drive growth:

We give a share of the revenue we make to the game developer – up to 50% depending on whether they implement our APIs and whether the game is exclusive to us.

Game developers will be able to use our 1-click payment system to charge for premium content in their games. For instance you could have a racing game where the first 3 tracks are free, and then additional tracks are $0.50 each or $5 for all of them. The price is up to the developer – here the revenue share will be much higher than 50% – it’s your game after all.

One cool thing we’re doing that isn’t implemented yet is a metagame. By playing the individual Flash games you can earn “Cards” – sort of like Achievements on Xbox Live. Those cards are playable in an online collectible card game, sort of like Magic the Gathering.

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