Vrabeck: Casual market worth $13.5bn by 2010

In a candid Q&A session – published for the first time on CasualGaming.biz – Vrabeck added that her department is forecasting to be worth a full $1 billion by 2011.

She also commented that EA chose the ‘Entertainment’ moniker for the division rather than ‘Games’ because:

“I run a group within EA called Casual Entertainment – purposefully not called ‘Casual Gaming’, because we think the way you reach that next level of consumer is with entertainment experiences that probably don’t relate one-on-one with how we think about what games are today.”

Vrabeck told the audience at Wedbush Morgan’s annual Management Access Conference:

“We have gone public in our earnings call this year in that the business [division] was a $420 million one for us – that’s 80 per cent growth over prior year. We’ve had a very busy year. We also went public in February with a goal for fiscal 2011 – three years from now – of being a $1 billion label. That’s the kind of growth we are projecting and working hard against.”

She added: “We look at the casual games business as around a $13.5 billion business over the next couple of years. That’s a worldwide number driven by mobile, online and what we consider handheld and a few casual games on the console.”