Interestingly, casual games have been around for longer than the ‘Casual Games’ label. While a distinct market sector only emerged in the last decade, games fitting the broad description – simple, addictive and highly accessible – have been enjoyed since the earliest days of video games.

Indeed, like organic farming and Bruce Forsyth, casual games aren’t so much an innovation as a back-to-basics revival: What’s new are the Internet-based distribution and monetisation methods, and the numerous new companies who’ve profited from identifying a vast and neglected swathe of would-be gamers.

GAMING’S LOST AND FOUND
The earliest games were made for everyone; Pong welcomed all with its simple approach to tennis in 1972, and the first home consoles were marketed as family machines. As games and consoles became more advanced, however, the cost of a game for both consumers and developers soared, leading publishers to focus on an ever-narrower demographic of young, game-savvy males.

While there were always exceptions, from much of Nintendo’s output to Will Wrights Sim games, somewhere between the mid-1980s and 1990s, the games industry marketed itself into a comfortable corner.

True, few non-gamers saw themselves as excluded. But the fact is that the ability to enjoy games isn’t handed out with the Y-chromosome and rescinded with a mortgage. Women were ignored by the mainstream games industry, but they kept playing games like Solitaire and Minesweeper, which were bundled with Windows. As for older men, they’d shown their gaming mettle as far back as Microsoft’s Flight Sim games in the 1980s – hardly a casual game in terms of the skills demanded, but with its humdrum real-world setting and lack of scores or levels, an anathema to hardcore gamers.

This neglected majority dropped another huge hint when Myst became one of the best-selling games of the 1990s. But it wasn’t until the 21st Century that games and the mass-market really got reacquainted. As the Internet became ubiquitous and familiar, the small-scale developers of simple puzzle, word and card games found a huge, hungry market on the other end of the line. Games such as PopCap’s Bejewelled (released 2001) became blockbuster hits, with casual games portals – including the forerunners of now-dominant players like Yahoo Games’, Pogo.com and MSN Games – attracting audiences in the millions.

MASS-MARKET MILLIONS
Today’s booming casual games market still reflects these roots, with the stereotypical casual consumer a housewife over 35 looking for a simple yet stimulating 10-minute timeout. But while such a generalisation is a useful first approximation – particularly in the contrast drawn with the equivalent hardcore gamer – it hardly captures the multitudes grouped under the ‘casual’ umbrella.

Young professionals, for instance, have made online poker a multi-billion dollar industry, while the ease of loading web-based games at work means casual gaming is just another staple of office distraction alongside Facebook and YouTube. Even hardcore gamers are drawn to quirky Flash-based games, and retro shooters like Geometry Wars.

Consumers who would sometimes be identified as casual gamers include:

• The 40-year old woman who enjoys two hours stints of Diner Dash but doesn’t call herself as a gamer.
• The 55-year old executive who hides his Tower Defence addiction behind Excel.
• The 30-year old woman who spends weekends in the mass-market friendly Second Life.
• The teenage Halo fan who bought Lumines Live! over Xbox Live Arcade.
• The eight-year old girl besotted with NeoPets.

This diversity is reflected in a multiplicity of business models, since the varying demographics differ in what they’ll pay for and how they’ll pay for it. Methods of converting the casual gaming impulse into cash include:

• Try-before-you-buy downloadables: Charging for full game downloads over the Net is invariably preceded by the distribution of trial versions.
• Subscriptions: Gamers pay a monthly charge for access to games and community features.
• Advertising: Games may be free but incorporate advertising, or ad revenues can supplement income from another strategy.
• Skill-based competitions: Here gamers pit their cash as well as their skills against one another. The host operator takes a cut of the pot.
• Microtransactions: Some games are initially free but offer in-game consumables or extensions. Gamers are charged on a piecemeal basis.

It all adds up – in sum the sector has grown from virtually nothing in 2000 to over $2 billion in sales for 2007.

CREATIVES CASH IN ON CASUAL
The first casual game successes inspired dozens more developers to enter the fray, attracted by relatively low costs, the ability to sell direct to the consumer, and the potential size of the market. Portals that aggregated numerous different games for a slice of revenue multiplied; successful developers expanded their staff and range, and a few also became aggregators themselves. Some also competed with new publishers in funding studios to create games in return for ownership of the products.

Development costs have since risen, but casual gaming is still accessible to start-up developers, especially now there are publishers as well as consumers who’ll buy their work. That steps around the more difficult issue, which is polarisation around the top game brands and portals. While the Internet’s capacity to store and distribute casual games is effectively unlimited, in practice ‘real-estate’ on a consumers’ screen restricts how many different games the portals can focus attention on. In addition certain segments of the market have become saturated, most notably Flash web games, where aggregators now rule the roost.

The market remains open to creative disruption, however. For example, old-fashioned adventure gaming was reborn in 2006 when Big Fish Games’ 2006 Mystery Case Files series secured millions of downloads.

SERIOUS BUSINESS
Casual games are now challenging the new status quo. Traditional games publishers who previously snubbed the sector have finally appreciated the huge opportunity that was under their nose, and are belatedly spending hundreds of millions trying to catch up. As conventional games increasingly turn to the digital distribution methods pioneered by casual games and some casual gamers are attracted to the more accessible ‘traditional’ experiences such as Nintendo’s Wii or Activision’s Guitar Hero, the lines will blur further.

In summary, it would be hard to name a more vibrant, rapidly evolving and far-reaching entertainment sector than casual games in 2008. While the financial rewards will probably polarise as the Wild West of competing business models and companies gives way to consolidation, the cat is out of the bag for consumers: We’re all gamers now.