Casual Connect recap

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

This week was the Seattle Casual Connect conference (the conference formerly known as Casuality). Talking to organizers there was around 1300 attendees this year, up from around 900 last year. What that really meant for me was that there were a lot of new faces, and many of those were people that are new to the casual games industry.

I gave my talk on Monday, and Gamasutra had a great writeup which covered all the major points. I’ve also posted the slides for it on my personal conferences page

With the “casual E3” just last week there was a lot more attention on the show than there ever had been before. A few companies took advantage of that to make big announcements.

A couple that are the most interesting to me were PopCap announcing that they acquired SpinTop Games and Retro64. A couple great developers that should be a good fit into the PopCap family. Related to this I finally met Mike Boeh who’s been a long-time contributor and supporter to the Indie gamer community.

The biggest news that’s probably going to reverberate the most throughout the industry was when MTV announced they’re investing $100 Million on casual games over the next 2 years. That’s a huge investment, and shows the confidence that major media corporations have in this space.

All told this was another great event, and I’m already looking forward to the next one!