Casual Games Conference - Day 1

BY: BRIAN ROBBINS  |  Casual Games, Conferences

Today was the first day of the Casual Games Conference. Overall it was a very good day. There is about 450+ attendees here, and the mood is very good. This is a small developer community that is extremely friendly, and that shows throughout.

Multiplayer Session A great session to kick off the conference. The main themes seemed to be that casual multi-player is heading towards having users purchase content. It also came up that if you want to reach beyond North America, you need to accept more than just credit card. Adeo Ressi from GameTrust (not part of the panel) indicated that less than half of their revenue comes from credit card.

The highlight of this session was at the end when asked for everyone’s “prophecy for the future” Daniel James from Three Rings Design said that he didn’t believe the $20 download model would still be around in 10 years.

PSP/DS Session Relatively interesting, but also largely inapplicable for many of the attendees. The main point that came from this is that developing a casual PSP game is much more than just porting a good casual game from the PC space. Development budgets are also much higher than casual games, ranging from $500K for DS, up to $1-2 Million for PSP.

Alternative Business Models This session started with a prediction that the Casual games space would hit $2 Billion in sales in 2008. For the most part the panelists said we could probably get there with more players, and having better development. It was also pointed out that developers need to start considering their IP as being a precious resource.

Advergaming This was the panel I participated on. I think it went really well. We were pretty lively and got into a couple things a bit including what is good for the advergame market, and what technologies are available. It was too bad we ran out of time at the end right as it really got interesting
Creative Plagiarism Scott Kim put on this session. He is a great game/puzzle designer, and he’s got some very interesting ideas about the space, and gameplay. The biggest point that he made throughout is that when you are borrowing ideas from either your own, or other games, you need to decide what to lose, what to keep and what to add. He also pointed out what he says is a great site for the game design principes behind You Don’t Know Jack in The Jack Principles at http://www.jellyvision.com/.

Tomorrow looks to have some interesting sessions, and will serve as the official Casua Games SIG kickoff, and the announcement of the availability of the Casual Games Whitepaper and the inaugural Casual Games Quarterly.