Simplicity Wins With Non-Gamers

For more than a year, Vivian Paige would spend an hour or so every night trying to beat Zuma. Last month, she finally did it.

Paige, a 40-something accountant from Norfolk, doesn't really consider herself "a gamer." And Zuma is hardly an action-packed game for the Xbox or a deep-thinking strategy game on the PlayStation.

In Zuma, players shoot marbles at a moving chain of colored marbles in matching combinations. Match three or four red marbles together and the chain shortens by three or four red marbles; if the chain gets too far, it's game over. Zuma takes no time to learn and is quickly habit-forming.

That's the thing about "casual games." They don't have impressive graphics, they don't feature exclusive tracks from famous hip-hop artists and they don't tend to feature Hollywood stars. Game magazines and Web sites tend to ignore simple titles like Zuma in favor of the latest state-of-the-art games that can require hours of instruction to master.

"It's the industry that not many people know about -- yet millions of people are playing our games," said Julie Pitt, general manager of distribution and publishing at RealNetworks, which sells casual games at its RealArcade site. "If you asked most of our customers if they were gamers, they would say no."

Casual games have been around for a long time -- think Minesweeper and Solitaire, for example, or the simple games that travel site Orbitz builds into some of its pop-up ads.

It's a relatively new development that casual games are actually starting to make some real money, though.

Game industry research firm DFC Intelligence reports that casual games will generate $458 million in revenue this year, compared with $314 million last year.

Casual game publishers typically use a try-before-you-buy model, in which users get to play a game for free for an hour; after that, they have to pay, typically about $20.

As an industry rule of thumb, only about 1 percent or 2 percent of those who ever try a casual game online will actually make a purchase.

For a game industry built on the wallets of young guys, the audience for casual games is a neat inversion of the rest of the market: There are more women than men playing these games, and most players are over 35.

Alexis Madrigal, an analyst at DFC Intelligence, said the increasing attention that casual games are getting from publishers is a sign that the game industry is working to appeal to a wider demographic than its core audience.