Simplicity Wins With Non-Gamers

By Mike Musgrove
Thursday, March 16, 2006

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.

"For years, the video game industry has been making the equivalent of action movie after action movie," in terms of its guy-centric appeal, he said. "It's just now figuring out how to appeal to somebody other than the 18- to 34-year-old males -- this is the first positive step in that direction."

Zuma's creator, PopCap Games, is one of the biggest players in this market. Its flagship puzzle game, Bejeweled, has sold 10 million units, the sort of numbers that a runaway hit series such as Grand Theft Auto might pull but hardly the norm among casual games.

PopCap chief executive David Roberts said his company's games are intended to put players in a relaxed mood. "When you play an Xbox game, you rev yourself up to play," he said. "If you play one of our games, you're revving down, you're relaxing."

Roberts said the stakes are still low enough in the casual game industry that companies like his can experiment in a way bigger game-publishing giants can't afford to.

Cutting-edge games for a new console such as the Xbox 360 can cost more than $10 million to produce; they typically involve a team of a hundred or so people working for several years. Such games are so expensive to make that a flop or two can put a publisher in serious financial pain.

Casual games, on the other hand, cost a few hundred thousand dollars to produce; a typical PopCap game takes three people working for about a year.

Where the video game industry usually likes to get buzz rolling about its upcoming titles months or even years in advance, Roberts comes across as unusual.

He says he isn't sure how many games the company will have out this year because he never knows when a game is going to be finished.

PopCap's designers don't have to time a game's release to match a movie opening or to hit the holiday season. If a game is any good, it'll catch on regardless of the release date. Sometimes, he said, the company will put a project on the shelf when the designers decide it just isn't fun enough.

If only the rest of the industry worked like this.