Casual Games Lifetimes
November 14th, 2006, By Duncan Gough
The lifetime of the average news story is 36 hours, driven in no small part by sites like del.icio.us and digg, that promote the freshness and relevance of news as part of their social features. As the previous article states, “6 hours is the amount of time it takes for half of the total readership of an article to have read it”. Whlist digg’s gaming seciton is rediscovering a lot of old flash games, it brings up the question of what is the lifetime of the average casual game.
To obvious place to start would be Mochibot, but they’re keeping that data to themselves for now, understandably. The Viral Chart have opened up their data to create a popularity list, but there’s little in the way of usable data. Elsewhere, this viral games chart at Kerb offers some interesting statistics. My suspicion is that casual games would have a ‘long tail’. However, looking at these stats it is clear that advergames in particular have a long and steady flow of traffic that is anything but viral. Naturally, any new advergame peaks when it is released, but there’s nowhere near the equivalent trought that I’d expected to see. Viral content seemingly thrives on its’ new-ness, but it seems that advergames are exploiting the two-speed nature of word-of-mouth on the web, making them an appealing and stable choice for any big brands that want to market themselves using games.
So are PC games the Picture of Dorian Gray to Casual Games? That is, has the blockbuster nature of PC game titles shortened their lifespan and handed the durability to Casual Games? According to ZDNet, even a game as massive as WoW is potentially growing old, but with MMOs you can upgrade the engine and the content, as EVE are doing with their expansion packs (which upgrade the politics, trade and adventures) and DirectX 10 fork. There’s strong possiblity that PC games are headed the way of the 36-hour news item, in the same way that blanket news coverage has led the trivialisation of everything. PC games, with their mutli-million dollar budgets and sequels, do seem to be heading in that same direction.
So what about Casual Games? Where are they headed? A quick straw poll of development times for casual games suggests that 9 to 10 months seems close to the average and, for that, the unpopular games seem to die away quickly, whlist the popular ones just keep earning.
So, if a popular game has a long lifetime, what about the most popular games? For this question, Games Sales Charts was invented. Games Sales Charts takes data from Real Networks and creates an archive of historical Casual Games performance.
Starting with a game I particularly like, Word Slinger from GameHouse lasted just a month in the top 10, as did another well produced Casual Game, Plantasia. The hugely successful Mystery Case Files – Huntsville lasted 18 weeks, and Insaniquarium Deluxe 14. Moving on, Luxor lasted 25 and Dinner Dash 33 weeks.
Of the 30 – 40 new games released each quarter, around 60% make it into the top 10, which seems a fair number. If you get your game on one of these portals, you’ve a good chance of a burst of massive exposure. In terms of Casual Game lifetimes, a game good enough to feature on a portal like Real Networks has a very real chance of appearing prominently in the top 10 for anything between a month and six months, significantly better than 36 hours.
All of this is moot, however, since getting one game on Xbox Live Arcade is going to earn you millions:
Like I explained in my earlier article about the bar raising in the XBLA360 arena, slot approvals are getting hard to get. In fact, I liken XBLA360 slots to the “Golden Ticket†in Willy Wonka. If you get one, you are set!
Update: Via this announcement from PopCap, it looks like working these sort of figures out should become much easier thanks to the Casual Games Data Reporting Initiative