Casual Games Conference - Day 2

BY: BRIAN ROBBINS  |  Casual Games, Conferences, Game Industry

Day 2 of the Casual Games Conference started off a bit slow with everyone trickling in a bit late in the morning. Once things got going the conference content again proved to be very solid.

Casual Game Audio: This session from Guy Whitmore of Microsoft was tragically underattended. Guy obviously knows a tremendous amount about game audio, and showcased a few titles that he has worked on which have much better audio than almost any other casual games available. The main points to take away from this session are that audio needs to be a collaborative effort between the programmers, game designers, and audio team. The tighter the integration between these people, the more successful it will be.

Contracts session: Unfortunately I missed the first part of this session when everyone went through their models about the revenue sharing throughout the industry. What I did hear is that people are starting to talk about changing the price point for games, although whether that will be up or down remains to be seen. I also found it interesting that 8 of the top 20 games on AOL’s portal have been on the service for 6+ months.

Mobile: The big theme here is that mobile development is a difficult space to get into and be successful for a small developer. A large scale title will need to support 150-225 devices potentially in multiple languages, making for a massive effort. However, the mobile players are looking for good games, and there is lots of room for casual developers to license their games into this space, and outsource the actual game port.

Appealing to a Casual Gamer Several key points were brought up in this session and gave great ideas on how to approach casual game development. The main topics covered were rising production values (they are a reality), developers need to know their audience (casual gamers don’t call themselves gamers), and the tradeoffs in innovation (risk vs. reward, and where on the spectrum of Innovation -> Iteration -> Imitation a game will fall)

Skill-Based Games A highly entertaining session as the players in this space are obviously quite competitive. Overall this is an interesting space that has decent, but not huge revenue (150-250 Million/year) The average income per player seems to be around $21.25/month (GameTrust) to possibly as much as $30/month (SkillJam), with the average player lasting about 4 months.

Overall Conference: This was an outstanding conference, and obviously one that was needed. The presenters were all very solid, and served to attract high-level people working in the industry. Attendance was outstanding and hopefully that can continue that success into the future.