13 new casual games each week [actually 12]

[James C. Smith]

13 new casual games each week. This is how many games your game will have to compete with. Between Real, MSN, BigFish, Reflexive, Shockwave, iWin, Pogo, GameHouse, PlayFirst, WildGames, ArcadeTown, Oberon there are a lot of new games released each week. Each of those 12 portals launch between 3 and 7 new games per week. Many of those are the same game that was already launched on another portal or sometimes the same game is launched on many portals on the same day. But on average, 13 of those games are new games that were never released on one of those portals before.

Here is a sampling of a few recent weeks and all the new games what came out that week.



Week of Games
2007-06-11 16 A Walk in the Park,Avernum 4,Cinema Empire,Diet Coke Daily Sudoku
Dream Chronicles™,FastCrawl,Mahjong World,Midnight Pool 3D,
Nancy Drew®: The Creature of Kapu Cave,Pozzle,Rain Talisman,
Riddle of the Sphinx,Sudoku, Kakuro, & Friends,The Dark Legions,
Tic-A-Tac Royale,Wu Hing

2007-06-18 12 Ammo Chase,ArchMage,Burger Island,Buzzword,Chicken Invaders 2 - The Next Wave,
Chromadrome 2,Flowers Story,Professor Fizzwizzle and the Molten Mystery,
Ruckus Buck's Dangerous Mines,Secrets of Great Art,Sprill,
Travelogue 360: Rome - The Curse of the Necklace

2007-06-25 11 Alien Disco Safari,Azada,Barrel Mania,Chocolate Castle,Jungo,
Jungular,Lottso! Deluxe,Restaurant Empire,Super Collapse! Puzzle Gallery 2,
Venice,YUMSTERS!

2007-07-02 14 Block Breaker Deluxe Midnight Challenge,Breaking News,
Hyperballoid Golden Pack,Liong: The Dragon Dance,
Mahjonng Championship,Miss Management,
Mortimer Beckett and the Secrets of Spooky Manor,Mr Robot,
Posh Shop,Rainforest Adventure,Scepter of Ra,The Last Hero,
The Stone of Destiny,Turbo Pizza

(my stated average of 13 is based on 20 weeks of data starting 2007-02-19. In those 20 weeks I didn’t see any trend up or down. Just random fluctuation between 8 and 18)

Now hurry up and finish that game you have been working on for months (or years) so it can be added to the pile and quickly buried.

[Dan MacDonald]

Ahh James... you're so mean! :)

Though I do remember the days when the prevailing wisdom for indies was to be where everyone else wasn't.... ahh those were the days!

[Cartman]

Emmm. Thanks for bursting our bubbles there James. This is depressing.

[James C. Smith]

Count me in with the depressed. I have been working on Ricochet Infinity for over a year and busting by butt to finish it this month but I have no idea if anyone will notice it in the pile.

[Agent 4125]

Casual games never die!

They just end up on a huge list of links next to "Pat Sajak's Trivia Gems."

[cliffski]

Meh. 13 NEW games? or 13 rehashes of the same idea? There may be a lot of different games titles, but in terms of different player experiences, it's not so over-supplied, by any margin.
The trick will always be to make a game that's original and different. I would expect the next Betty Beer bar Clone to sell badly, and the next Mystery case Files clone to sell badly too, but I suspect Peggle still shifts some serious copies.

[Jack Norton]

That's the theory and what reason should believe. In reality, since I'm selling some copies as affiliate (reflexive, BFG, and so on) I notice that MCF serie/clones sells actually a LOT more than Peggle or other "original" games.

The world is doomed. :eek:

[Sparks]

The odds are still better than trying to compete with Assasin's Creed, Halo 3 or other PC blockbusters :)
And always remember Blair Witch, its not the budget, its the execution.
Democracy anyone...

[Applewood]

I'm with cliff. This fits the standard model perfectly.

See someone making money
Do the exact same thing too
Rinse, repeat until totally saturated market fit for nobody

Sound familiar ?

[Andy]

That's the theory and what reason should believe. In reality, since I'm selling some copies as affiliate (reflexive, BFG, and so on) I notice that MCF serie/clones sells actually a LOT more than Peggle or other "original" games.

The world is doomed. :eek:

I believe MCF series are pretty original RE-discovery for the casual genre. Every oldie here knows my opinion about Big Dish company. But I have to admit this is one of the best their achievement and deserves respect ( at least from me personally ;) ) So, please Jack.... ;) As for the rest of the topic - well... welcome to the hell of reality. Svero was predicting this by three ( four? ) years ago. And he knows something about the stuff. So what would you expect after all. And don't get catched on idea "I'll make better game". Try to sell it better to portals. Like ask for advance payment or something. Learn to do business. Not just make a game. :)

[Sol_HSA]

And always remember Blair Witch, its not the budget, its the execution.
Blair Witch, like Deer Hunter - it's not the budget, it's just darn good luck.. =)

[princec]

I'm with Cliff here. We're doing our own thing, and our stuff will never be found on a portal. Ever.*

Cas :)

Should this mysteriously change one day in the future I will send round a lorry full of dead dogs to park outside of the house of whichever smartarse brings this quote up in some thread or other

[svero]

I'm with Cliff here. We're doing our own thing, and our stuff will never be found on a portal. Ever.*

Cas :)

Should this mysteriously change one day in the future I will send round a lorry full of dead dogs to park outside of the house of whichever smartarse brings this quote up in some thread or other

Alllllllready bookmarked.

[ZuluBoy]

Should this mysteriously change one day in the future I will send round a lorry full of dead dogs to park outside of the house of whichever smartarse brings this quote up in some thread or other
LOOOOOL :D

[Bmc]

A good chunk of those 13 titles being released each week are blatant uninspired clones that won't have any type of impact on the market, basically they are filler titles for sites like Big Fish that need to release a game a day.

[Desktop Gaming]

Now hurry up and finish that game you have been working on for months (or years) so it can be added to the pile and quickly buried.*mumbles something about not receiving replies to e-mails sent to Reflexive*

(original e-mail sent 24th March, followed up 19th April 2007, if you want specifics)

Further e-mail sent about three weeks ago querying a Reflexive product which had been (possibly incorrectly) priced at $9.95. No reply to that either.

Its sort of annoying when people don't reply to e-mails. Even a polite "f**k off" would be an improvement.

[edit] Probably shouldn't single out Reflexive, when BFG are no better.

[princec]

I'm with cliff. This fits the standard model perfectly.

See someone making money
Do the exact same thing too
Rinse, repeat until totally saturated market fit for nobody

Sound familiar ?

But that's how markets work!! ALL markets to one degree or another. It happens especially fast in the media markets because it's relatively easy to create products.

See the pioneer? That's the guy with the arrow in his back. Let other people educate the market for you - eg. original MCF coders - then write something that's like it and ride the coattails. Perfectly sensible. I mean, we'd all love to write the next big thing but the chances are absolutely tiny. Look at the number of totally original concepts in gaming versus the number of developers. One needs to find another way to differentiate!

Cas :)

[GolfHacker]

Personally, I'm not too worried. We have a very original game in Fashion Cents, which was a 2004 IGF finalist and has won lots of awards and good reviews. It has never been on any portals (several turned it down, though, because they considered it a "kid's game"), but sales have done fairly well for us (despite our limited advertising). And when PopCap tried to buy the rights from us last year, it only confirmed to me that we had a winner on our hands.

We're currently revamping the game, and expanding it to onto Mac and Linux. When we're done, I have a plan for advertising that should work nicely for us.

The best part is this: I have a growing customer base that is becoming fairly substantial, and they're looking to me for similar games. That's all one needs to grow a business and become successful.

Portals - bah! Who needs them?

[James C. Smith]

Now hurry up and finish that game you have been working on for months (or years) so it can be added to the pile and quickly buried
*mumbles something about not receiving replies to e-mails sent to Reflexive*


I apogee. For a minute I forgot that I work for a company that launches a game a day to add to the pile. In that light, my comment seems very inappropriate.

You have to realize that I personally am a game developer. I don’t run a portal or sell other peoples’ games. I MAKE games. And I also run game-sales-charts.com that monitors what games are being made and sold. I try to identify trends on the portals mostly out of curiosity and somewhat to help me know what to make (or avoid making) in my next game.

I am not here to represent Reflexive. I am here to voice the opinions and share the experience of one casual game developer. ME! But much of my experience is from working at Reflexive so some of the advice I share is about services offered by Reflexive. In this particular topic I am sharing the knowledge I have from running game-sales-charts.com and combing over the data every way I can think of. I am also using carcasses to discuss a potential problem with my fallow game developer peers. But it doesn’t really come off that way if you think of me as a representative of the company that distributed your game.

Regarding e-mail replies, I am sure someone from Reflexive did reply. Every couple months I get PMed on this forum by people who tried to contact Reflexive and didn’t get a reply. Every time I go talk to the Reflexive Arcade producers about these cases they dig though their archives and find many replies that were sent to the person. They do not have a policy of letting e-mails go without a reply. But given the unreliable nature of e-mail these days, it can be a real problem to make sure the reply is received. Please check your spam filters, or try using a different e-mail account, or try contacting though a different channel.

[James C. Smith]

I'm with Cliff here. We're doing our own thing, and our stuff will never be found on a portal. Ever.*

Cas :)


This is why I posted this in the CASUAL games forum. I am so tired of the debate about if portals and casual games are good or not. If you want to do your own thing that is great. But in the casual forum, we talk about the people who are doing the casual/portal thing.

[Desktop Gaming]

I am sure someone from Reflexive did reply.I guarantee they 100% didn't!

I'm not having a go at anybody in particular here, I'm generalising. But, I find its all very easy to blame e-mail and spam filters and so on, when the truth is, a lot of company staff simply can't be bothered to do their jobs properly.

I used to work for a company with more than 4,000 employees and I've seen it happen countless times, first hand. Regardless of company policy, there are people who are employed by companies but do not do their jobs properly. Where I used to work, one guy used to sit reading newspapers all day instead of manning the phone like he was supposed to. When he was eventually pulled up about it, he threw a major eppy, told his line manager to 'get f**ked' and stormed out. This is just one example but I'm not going to delude myself that it doesn't happen elsewhere.

Point is, you can have as many company policies as you like, but if your staff can't/won't/don't follow them, it reflects badly on the company.

[Skinflint]

Please send me a PM and I will make sure your correspondence gets to the right person over here.

Unlike that huge company that you mentioned, were actually less than 25 people, and we're all people that love our jobs. :)

[Olivier]

Valuable info as usual James, but how frightening!

Joe Average: "With so many new games to choose from each week, I can easily get my game fix by only playing the demos. Yeepee! :)"

Joe Below Average (writing through my website's form): "Could you please put more games at your website because I have finished all of them?"
For sure that guy was talking about demos, not the full versions.

And let me quote myself from this thread (http://forums.indiegamer.com/showthread.php?t=9863): "Too many (new) games diminishes the overall value of the offer."

[princec]

This is why I posted this in the CASUAL games forum. I am so tired of the debate about if portals and casual games are good or not. If you want to do your own thing that is great. But in the casual forum, we talk about the people who are doing the casual/portal thing.
We're writing casual games though... they just won't be available on portals. Oh! The dichotomy!

Cas :)

[papillon]

Well, with Avernum 4 on that list, there's the obvious "What's a casual game?" question but it's still beside the point. :)

[Pyabo]

Well, with Avernum 4 on that list, there's the obvious "What's a casual game?" question but it's still beside the point. :)

Shhhhhh... that is #2 on the list of questions never to ask out loud. Man, I'm gonna make another post. Maybe an admin can sticky it... :)

[electronicStar]

Yeah it made me a bit sad to see avernum on that list. Spidersoft was one of my indie heroes , I hope he doesn't dilute his niche success by dealing with portals.

[cyrus_zuo]

Yeah it made me a bit sad to see avernum on that list. Spidersoft was one of my indie heroes , I hope he doesn't dilute his niche success by dealing with portals.

For whatever it is worth, some of the first games on Real Arcade were Geneforge 1 & 2. That is back before Real Arcade found success with casual games and was doing more traditional games.

http://www.realarcade.com/game?gameid=geneforge&src=gmpg&tps=ambient_

They are in the strategy/sim area.

So he dealt with the portals about 5 years ago...for whatever it is worth.

[ninesquirrels]

Now hurry up and finish that game you have been working on for months (or years) so it can be added to the pile and quickly buried.

That's sobering. Curious what your suggestions would be? That sounds suspiciously close to "just give up - you have no hope" - which I honestly know you aren't trying to suggest.

So knowing that you are genuinely trying to help, what would you suggest other casual game developers do with this information other than gnash their teeth and despair?

[James C. Smith]

what would you suggest other casual game developers do with this information other than gnash their teeth and despair?


Most of those game are “disposable”. Even the biggest fans “finish” them in a few days, maybe reply a second time to “do better” and then they are “done” with it. They move on to the next game. I guess making games like that is a good way to keep people buying more games (or trying more demos) but why would they choose your disposable game over the other 12 released that week?

What I do is try to make a game that will keep people attention for more than a couple days and have more ways to find it than just the portals. Many people have been playing Ricochet every day for years. I bet they have told a few friends about it in all that time.


Ring. Ring.
Hello?
Hey Tom, what’s up?
Oh… just playing Ricochet
Again? You play that game all the time!
Yeh. It’s great. You really should try it. There is something new every day.
With the amount of value they get out of my games like this, they are very likely to buy the sequel and very likely to tell many fiend about it. It really helps the game keep selling beyond the initial top 10 debut.

I am not saying this is the answer. There are many other approaches. But this is one approach I use.

[mrkwang]

Dear James, can I use your data for Pig-Min news?

Please let me know about that. Thanks. :)

[DFG]

Most of those game are “disposable”. Even the biggest fans “finish” them in a few days, maybe reply a second time to “do better” and then they are “done” with it.

This is the kind of environment that will put an end to rampant cloning. Only the standouts will have the long term earning potential which is what really makes a game valuable. I would rather a game that stays in the top 40 for 52 weeks than 1 that is top 10 one week and gone the next.

I also think portals will start figuring out that releasing so many games every week is really not a good idea in the long run.

[papillon]

As a player, I'm afraid that limiting the number of releases might mean that they'd ONLY put out shiny clones and never take a chance on anything new and different...

[ninesquirrels]

Personally, I'm not too worried. We have a very original game in Fashion Cents... but sales have done fairly well for us (despite our limited advertising)....

That's really great - I'm really pleased to hear Fashion Cents is doing well, I thought it was a neat idea when I played it (though I soon learned to hate the "Ewww!" voice when I made an incorrect combination :) ).

Can you maybe share some tips on how you grew your audience and how you developed a user base w/o relying on portals? I think we'd all really benefit from your experience.

[ninesquirrels]

As a player, I'm afraid that limiting the number of releases might mean that they'd ONLY put out shiny clones and never take a chance on anything new and different...

Not sure I share that fear. Both Aveyond and Cute Knight are a pretty good examples of a games that were nothing like a clone, but they both did well on the portals, no? If portals only picked the shiny clones, and the really new ideas didn't find a space on portal X, there would be a pretty good business in being Portal Y that DOES deal in these games.

The difference (maybe) is that both portals X and Y would limit themselves to polished games - clones or not. The days of releasing unpolished "jewels in the rough" are likely over...

[GolfHacker]

That's really great - I'm really pleased to hear Fashion Cents is doing well, I thought it was a neat idea when I played it (though I soon learned to hate the "Ewww!" voice when I made an incorrect combination :) ).

Can you maybe share some tips on how you grew your audience and how you developed a user base w/o relying on portals? I think we'd all really benefit from your experience.

Thanks, ninsquirrels!

Traditional advertising methods didn't work for Fashion Cents, since it is aimed squarely at young girls who don't typically visit gaming web sites. In the end, Google Adwords turned out to be the best advertising avenue for our limited budget. We used keywords like "fashion games" and "dressup games", and within a day we had increased our web site traffic 10x over. Our sales went up proportionally too.

We also added a "how did you hear about us" field in our shopping cart when purchasing the game. For awhile, Google Adwords was #1. Currently, the most popular choice is "a friend", so word-of-mouth is our best advertising source at this point. Girls like the game so much, they show it to their friends, and then they buy it.

Interestingly, though the game is targeted toward young girls, it seems to have a broad appeal to women of all ages. We have grandmothers in their 80s who play the game every night, who tell us the game reminds them of playing with paper dolls when they were growing up. We have moms who bought the game for their daughters, and the moms end up playing the game as much (if not more) than their daughters. So the broad appeal of the game helps too.

I think the best lesson I learned from the experience is that we produced a good game for a particular niche market that we felt was overlooked by mainstream gaming, and they really appreciated it. Our customers write to tell us how they enjoy it, and how they want more games like it. When we ran some contests a couple of years ago and gave away some unique clothing items for the game, we got a huge response from our customers who participated with enthusiasm. We also occasionally release free add-on packs for the game (containing new clothes) - when it first came out, we released new add-ons quarterly. We also provided updates to the game with new features, so we keep adding value to the game in lots of ways. So it has been very easy to build a community around our game because we keep the customers coming back for more. I think that helped too. Fashion Cents Deluxe lays the foundation to allow our customers to eventually add their own add-on content to the game, and that will help also.

Sorry for the longwinded post, but I hope our experiences help give you some ideas about how to build a user base for your non-portal games.

[papillon]

Not sure I share that fear. Both Aveyond and Cute Knight are a pretty good examples of a games that were nothing like a clone, but they both did well on the portals, no? If portals only picked the shiny clones, and the really new ideas didn't find a space on portal X, there would be a pretty good business in being Portal Y that DOES deal in these games.

The difference (maybe) is that both portals X and Y would limit themselves to polished games - clones or not. The days of releasing unpolished "jewels in the rough" are likely over...


But I very much was an unpolished game - and even with several people backing me, had to wait a long time for BFG to fit me into their release schedule. To their surprise it sold well. I know several other newbies who've found that BFG's big mass of releases was also their best chance at getting their game out there. They didn't have the same luck of being a surprise success, but at least they got the chance.

Manifesto wants to be Portal Y - but they are not at all successful in selling Cute Knight. Audiences are weird. :)

[James C. Smith]

As a game developer, I find the 13 games per week rather intimidating and depressing, but also liberating. It is nice to know there are many available slots to give a game a chance.


A good chunk of those 13 titles being released each week are blatant uninspired clones that won't have any type of impact on the market, basically they are filler titles for sites like Big Fish that need to release a game a day.

I get annoyed with the people who say things like this. No portal needs a game to fill a quota. I know the Reflexive Arcade producers receive 30 games submissions per week, and most are crap (or just not good enough), but there are often 10 good games in a week. For a long time Reflexive only released 5 games per week. But when a launch worthy game was received, it was put into the launch queue and the queue was getting very long. They switched to a game a day to enable them to launch all the launch worthy games in a timely manor. They are never looking for games to fill a spot. They are always looking for spots to fit all the games they want to launch.




As a player, I'm afraid that limiting the number of releases might mean that they'd ONLY put out shiny clones and never take a chance on anything new and different...

I agree 100%



Not sure I share that fear. Both Aveyond and Cute Knight are a pretty good examples of a games that were nothing like a clone, but they both did well on the portals, no? If portals only picked the shiny clones, and the really new ideas didn't find a space on portal X, there would be a pretty good business in being Portal Y that DOES deal in these games.

If the portals did limit the number of releases these are exactly the kinds of games that would be missed. Both Aveyond and Cute Knight were given a chance by the portals that release a game a day. None of the bigger portals started distributing these games until months after they already did well on Reflexive and Big Fish. These game were allowed to due well because of the 13 games per week environment. I believe they would have had much less success in a limited restrained release environment. It is much less likely that the bigger portals would have launched them were it not for the game a day portals.

MSN, and Real are the portal Xs in your example and Refleixve and Big Fish are the portal Ys that resulted to correct the situation.

[jcottier]

...and our stuff will never be found on a portal. Ever.*


Sorry, and I don't mean to be disrespectful but why such a narrow state of mind?

Ok, you might not like the portals but why not wanting to sell your games on their portals? Surely, they can expose your games to a wider audience and this resulting in more income for you. This doesn’t make any business sense. Surely, you should embrace all the opportunities you have to diffuse your game to the world.

JC

[princec]

Sorry, and I don't mean to be disrespectful but why such a narrow state of mind?

Ok, you might not like the portals but why not wanting to sell your games on their portals? Surely, they can expose your games to a wider audience and this resulting in more income for you. This doesn’t make any business sense. Surely, you should embrace all the opportunities you have to diffuse your game to the world.

JC

Puppygames is about making a long term business with an exit at the end of it. Our first and foremost objective is to grow our customer base, above and beyond making any money, until such a point that we have so many customers whatever we release or announce is guaranteed to pay back its time. If we give our games to portals we simultaneously cripple our customer base growth and increase our competitors' growth. At the end of it all when we come to exit we'll have nothing worth selling. On the other hand if we build up a 50,000 strong mailing list we've got something worth a few bob. I don't know if we'll ever achieve 50,000 unique customers but that's our goal. We're 5% of the way there.

Portals are competitors: they are not developers, they are retailers. Puppygames is a retailer, and we just happen to make most of our own products.

I don't know if that explains it well enough, but that's the basic thinking behind it. We're in it for the long run.

Cas :)

[Jack Norton]

Also if your game isn't a match3/dinerdash/zuma/mcf clone, your chances to make money with portals are very low. I have some real direct experience about this, and thinking again now was really stupid to think that my kind of games could sell to portal audience :D

[James C. Smith]

Also if your game isn't a match3/dinerdash/zuma/mcf clone, your chances to make money with portals are very low.

Don't forget sim, breakout, bingo, mahjong, slots, board game, licensed IP, word games, inlay, solitaire, trivia, path creation, jigsaw.


Plus, occasionally shoot em up, platform, adventure, and light RPG games do well on portals.


And I predict the up and coming type will be mini games. Several past games have done well and some recent ones are doing amazing.


And occasions good or great portal selling games don't fit any of these such as Feeding Frenzy, Cosmic Bugs, Peggle Deluxe


But you’re right, if your game doesn’t fit any of those categories than you can just forget about portals because they never switch to a new core mechanic like a fad. (unless you count the 2004 switch to chain poppers, the 2005 switch to click management, the 2006 switch to hidden object) Besides, you wouldn’t want to be the first to define the next new portal fad because then you would have to deal with everyone cloning your game. All the money you would receive wouldn’t make up for the injustice of the cloning.

Of course I am being sarcastic here. And I do a agree that the portals audience is fairly constrained in the types of games they like. But I just think you are going to far when you say portals are a bad market because they only like 4 kinds of games. It is much more diverse than that and constantly evolving.



I have some real direct experience about this, and thinking again now was really stupid to think that my kind of games could sell to portal audience :D

Many people also have real direct experience with making match3/dinerdash/zuma/mcf clone games and having very low chances of making money. Most new products in most markets have lots of risk associated with them.

[cyrus_zuo]

Portals are competitors: they are not developers, they are retailers. Puppygames is a retailer, and we just happen to make most of our own products.

I don't know if that explains it well enough, but that's the basic thinking behind it. We're in it for the long run.

I've mentioned this before, but thought it bore mentioning here.

Portals are a great source of traffic. Reflexive built up its traffic initially by releasing its games on other portals. We used that traffic and grew, just the way that you are mentioning. I think it is a great plan, building up your own website and being large over the long term. It's possible that being on the portals might actually help you towards your goal.

For a more recent case study, my brother released his game, Cursed Valley, about a month ago. The day it went into the Real beta he increased his traffic 300 people a day. The day it went live on BFG his traffic increased 2000 people a day. Now a month and a half later he is still getting more people to come to his site in one day than he used to get in a month. All of this traffic is from the portals and he is making a great side business of selling his game directly as well as selling the other games he has on his site. Previous to the game release he didn't sell much of anything from the site. What was perhaps even more interesting was that the game sales of the game he was selling on the portal were really strong on his site after releasing on the portal. I don't know if they were people who wanted to go direct to the developer or exactly how that happened, but it clearly was sales coming from people who first played on the portal. (notably, he did follow my advice about trying to put a hook in the game that would tell customers to go looking for his site W/O HAVING a direct link).

Anyway, I feel like a broken record...but my basic feeling is that if you aren't turning the portal traffic into your own traffic you're doing it wrong.

Another example? Aveyond has 100x more direct website traffic today b/c it was on the portals. Amanda stated that she intentionally put quests in the game that were obscure and hard so that people would go looking...and when they did, they found her site. For that game and then her future games, her traffic was growing.

Honestly, it is great to grow your website on your own, but I think it makes even more sense to steal traffic away from the portals...they've already gone through the process of building it. If you don't want to call it stealing you can call it 'taking advantage of the buzz when the game is released on the portals.' I've seen it referred to that way, it's the same thing in business speak :).

http://www.rampantgames.com/blog/2007/07/utah-indie-developer-night-summer-2007.html

[svero]

Don't forget sim, breakout, bingo, mahjong, slots, board game, licensed IP, word games, inlay, solitaire, trivia, path creation, jigsaw.

Plus, occasionally shoot em up, platform, adventure, and light RPG games do well on portals.


It's not a genre thing... It's a how the game is presented thing. IMO Games of just about any genre can be casualized....

[TunaBreeze]

Emmm. Thanks for bursting our bubbles there James. This is depressing.

I suppose it could be depressing, but you could certainly use this information to your advantage. At least now you have more information about what your up against.

[arcadetown]

See a few freebie games in that list like "A Walk in the Park". So good news! Maybe it's more like 11 - 12 casual games per week.

[Jack Norton]

But I just think you are going to far when you say portals are a bad market because they only like 4 kinds of games. It is much more diverse than that and constantly evolving.

I think maybe is more a presentation/interface thing. While I have many tooltip and in-game text, surely my games are more difficult to play for the "average joe" that plays portal games.
Casual players probably prefer plot and art over game complexity and details.
Also maybe my kind of art isn't really good for portals - once again cute anime character surely works better (aveyond and cute knight are the proof).

[princec]

Portals are a great source of traffic. Reflexive built up its traffic initially by releasing its games on other portals. We used that traffic and grew, just the way that you are mentioning. I think it is a great plan, building up your own website and being large over the long term. It's possible that being on the portals might actually help you towards your goal.

While I have considered that angle, I get a vast amount of traffic when I release a new game just from news sites, affiliates, a couple of download sites, and game reviews - I feel no need to play with the poisonous snakes. The last game we released, Titan, was selling 50 copies a day without a single penny spent on marketing. The portals do spent an inordinate amount of time - mine too - trying to prevent "traffic leakage" (I've heard Brian F talk about this phenomenon before). This is why we get all these tactics like removing company logos or clickable URLs or online hiscore tables etc etc.

Cas :)

[Bmc]

It's not a genre thing... It's a how the game is presented thing. IMO Games of just about any genre can be casualized....

agreed ... I'm still waiting for a tower defense type of game to come and do well. I know BFG released one last year, but I wouldn't say it was really targeted towards the casual audience.

I'm sort of on the fence about doing one myself, set in a garden, but there have been so many garden themed Insaniquarium type games in the past 2 years I fear it might be brushed off as another "me too" by the players.

[papillon]

I'm sort of on the fence about doing one myself, set in a garden, but there have been so many garden themed Insaniquarium type games in the past 2 years I fear it might be brushed off as another "me too" by the players.


Use fairies vs insects in a mystical grove so it's not quite gardens? :)

[spellcaster]

I don't know if they were people who wanted to go direct to the developer or exactly how that happened, but it clearly was sales coming from people who first played on the portal.
I can only speak for myself, but I find the information given on the portals are too shallow. If a game looks interesting, I check the developer's site for more information.

[svero]

agreed ... I'm still waiting for a tower defense type of game to come and do well. I know BFG released one last year, but I wouldn't say it was really targeted towards the casual audience.

Yup. I think we still haven't seen the pinnacle of casual stategy, role playing or many other genres really.. Some stuff arguably goes part of the way there, but still lots of room to fine tune etc...

[James C. Smith]

See a few freebie games in that list like "A Walk in the Park". So good news! Maybe it's more like 11 - 12 casual games per week.

I think Arcade Town release one free web game per week and I was counting them. I removed Arcade town from my query and the average went from 12.9048 down to 11.9524. In other words, it dropped by almost exactly 1 game per week.

So good news. It is only 12 games per week not 13.

Now have to change a few slides in my presentation. :-( Changing the 13 to a 12 is easy but I update my list of games is inconvenient

[Qitsune]

Now have to change a few slides in my presentation. :-( Changing the 13 to a 12 is easy but I update my list of games is incontinent

I sure hope you mean inconsistent. I'd be curious to see the number of free games released each week, since free games in some way compete with paying games. I don't mean you should look it up. Maybe I should in fact, but it would be harder to track down.

[James C. Smith]

I corrected the typo

I am also curious about the number of free web games and free download games but that is a whole different project. I am also curious about mobile games but again, I am not going to go there. Just tracking the downloadable try and buy games is enough work.

[Spore Man]

May have been mentioned already but will repeat if so:

Daily content updates is how to increase and maintain a loyal web visitor audience. So although quantity of games looks scary from a competitive stand-point, it's good in terms of the size of the audience your product gets exposed to. (Look at it as a necessary evil).

Another thing to make this seem less scary: Not all players are into all game types. In fact I'd argue the casual audience is very much fractured into niche tastes (which is why clones do so well). I don't believe every portal visitor downloads and tries every new release. I believe they only download and try what interests them, especially a new release in their taste niche. (For example my dad only like break out clones, so it doesn't matter to him there are 13 new games released a week, what matters to him is one or two break out clones, if any).

[arcadetown]

Yup. I think we still haven't seen the pinnacle of casual stategy, role playing or many other genres really.. Some stuff arguably goes part of the way there, but still lots of room to fine tune etc...
I'm cetainly holding hope. Trick is most everyone targets for a hit on RealArcade which mostly excludes strategy games. I'm hoping for an uber hit strategy game which will make devs wake up. Perhaps upcoming Dream Chronicles may do that.

Master of Defense was an awesome game but there were complexities that could have been simplified for a more casual appeal. Unfortunately it didn't hit that well as an opening salvo for tower defense games in casual scene.

[svero]

I'm cetainly holding hope. Trick is most everyone targets for a hit on RealArcade which mostly excludes strategy games. I'm hoping for an uber hit strategy game which will make devs wake up. Perhaps upcoming Dream Chronicles may do that.

Master of Defense was an awesome game but there were complexities that could have been simplified for a more casual appeal. Unfortunately it didn't hit that well as an opening salvo for tower defense games in casual scene.


Well.. as this thread sort of points out there is this kinda of diminishing returns thing when targeting the biggest hit genres. You always risk being one of 10-20 similar games which can't be good for sales. So there will always be someone taking a chance and trying. I think we'll see one eventually... And if so.. many :-)

[Dan MacDonald]

The biggest risk is not taking a risk :)

[arcadetown]

Speaking of risk, anyone notice Risk is hitting a few top 10s out there including Real, and it's a strategy game. This and hits like Virtual Villagers, Fish Tycoon, etc show casual players are totally ready IMO.

[Jack Norton]

Yes but please don't compare the "strategy" element of "Risk" with "Command and Conquer" or "Galciv2"... :eek:

[Mr. Sanity]

Speaking of risk, anyone notice Risk is hitting a few top 10s out there including Real, and it's a strategy game. This and hits like Virtual Villagers, Fish Tycoon, etc show casual players are totally ready IMO.

Ah, but Risk has the advantage of being a known title for the last 48 years. Most people have had at least some brushes with the boardgame, so it's something that has a big "in" due to being familiar.

[Kaos]

Count me in with the depressed. I have been working on Ricochet Infinity for over a year and busting by butt to finish it this month but I have no idea if anyone will notice it in the pile.

I will notice, mastercard is still acceptable, right?