Jason Hill has written a fantastic article for the Sydney Morning Herald on the rise and rise of casual games. Jason has compiled some great insights and stats on the casual game market, from the 10 million unit selling popular Bejeweled title, the 200 employee strong company that developed it, and the large percentage of females that buy their range of casual games. The article looks back at the games industry with Atari founder Nolan Bushnell and how the audience for games has shrunk over the years due to game violence and complexity, and how casual games are bringing them back through many different new platforms.
The article also has some words from Infinite Interactive's Steve Fawkner on the casual market...
"Those casual players have been there for years. I'm excited that we've finally noticed them. I think that as game designers we have been having so much fun living our childhood fantasies to create 'hardcore' games, that we failed to notice there were a much larger bunch of people who still wanted to play but didn't share our enthusiasm for complexity.
"Now we've not only seen those people, but we've learned from them about how to make our games better."