The C word

Blog

Sep 25th 2008 at 13:26 by Michael French

I’m sure that in the minds of some, the industry’s recent widening and shift towards a broader content is regarded cynically and that the label ‘casual’ is akin to a dirty word – representative of cheaper, low-end games that have been sparked by the Nintendo Wii and DS and are sure to evaporate once we enter the next hardware cycle. They're wrong, though.

The C word

The establishment of the casual sector, after years on the fringe of the core games market, comes in response to demographic shifts rather than as a new fad genre. And undoubtedly, the concept of casual games has become a transformative force in the industry.

It’s wrong to say that the transformation has done nothing more than allowed new game platforms and new interfaces to be sold by the industry to a wider variety of customers.
What the casual revolution has enabled is the chance for the games industry to experiment, challenging the definition of games. No, perhaps not in the most innovative sense – Brain Training’s biggest calculations are the ones it asks the players to work out, not its polygon rendering.

But the fact mainstream games companies are now just as adept at creating games that educate, inform or instruct (via language learning titles, cooking guides, driving test software and more) just as much as they thrill and entertain, is commercially innovative. Now female players, older gamers, lapsed games and people who only play sporadically value ‘interactive entertainment’ and don’t just dismiss it.

We already knew that games had cultural worth and relevance, but the casual category has not only reached out to new players – it has helped legitimise the industry in the eyes of those previously unconvinced it has value amongst groups like families.

The formal naming of this shift has been a long time coming, with the foundations for this new mood amongst publishers and consumers originally being laid by the efforts of otherwise hardcore companies or games products.

Things like the original Game Boy through to The Sims and SingStar, which tipped over into huge mainstream acceptance, did much of the groundwork. So too did the companies like PopCap or Big Fish at the heart of the casual market (but until recently incorrectly seen as sitting on the fringe of the overall industry) who pioneered in the downloadable games space and originally embraced ‘casual’ as a label and, crucially, defined it.

However, whether newcomer or established player, everyone in the casual space is agreed that this is still a category of the games industry that is at a young stage and will welcome more growth and is ripe with opportunity.