Gaming Biz: Know the Score Before You Play

Written by Laura Tiffany

Whether played online, downloaded to a gaming console or phone or purchased for a handheld game system, casual games like Bejeweled, Zuma and Luxor are making their mark on the gaming industry. With rainbow-bright and fast-paced puzzles, word and arcade games, these games are keeping folks busy during lunch breaks, while waiting in interminable lines and after the little ones have fallen asleep.

This $2.25 billion industry is growing 20% each year, according to the Casual Games Association (CGA) 2007 Market Report. Each month, more than 200 million people play casual games online. And while "serious" gamers tend to be young men, casual gamers are more evenly split: 48.3% are male, and 51.3% are female. In fact, according to Craig Holland, founder of game publisher Freeze Tag and marketing director with the CGA, "Women account for 74% of the paying casual game players," meaning ladies are the ones who pony up the bucks for downloads.

John Vechey, Brian Fete and Jason Kapalka started PopCap -- maker of the ubiquitous Bejeweled -- back in 2000 after the trio quit their dot-com jobs. "We knew from our prior work in the space that there was an ever-growing market of people with computers who were interested in games," Kapalka says. "They just couldn't find any besides Solitaire and Minesweeper that they enjoyed in the game marketplace at that time." Over the past year, the Seattle-based company doubled its employees and has been highly profitable without ever taking outside funding.

Kapalka says PopCap makes games for people who don't like games and since the field is so new, many potential customers haven't found games they like. "They see some violent game for Xbox and think, 'That's not for me,'" he says. "[But] if we can get a self-professed non-gamer to sit down in front of Bejeweled or Zuma or Peggle for 10 minutes, we can convert half of them right there."

The simplicity of casual games is an attractive quality; there's no steep learning curve and players can use devices they're already familiar with, rather than having to adapt to a new controller.

Dave Walls, who started his game production company Funkitron in 2001, says the try-before-you-buy aspect is also crucial for growth in the industry. "It made it really easy for [non-gamers] to get involved -- to see the games, to try out the games," says Walls, who creates games based on licensed board game brands like Scrabble, Blokus and Boggle, as well as poker and trivia games. "People can play the game for an hour, make sure it works, make sure they have fun. And that just makes it easier for them to buy another one."

Keeping Score

The ways to make money in the casual games industry are as varied as the games themselves. Most of Walls' Funkitron sales come from computer downloads; his games are featured on distribution sites where there's a revenue share. He sometimes partners with companies to extend his reach into other platforms, like mobile downloads, without splitting his focus.