In Search of the Casual

In the last year or so there’s been a mounting interest in gaming media on casual games.  Publishers have no doubt been looking at the casual game space for several years prior - and understandably - as the current industry is valued at approximately 2.25 billion dollars and rapidly increasing.  You know what I think would be great?  If every time people talked about the casual games industry I didn’t see the picture below.

I know that Bejeweled makes PopCap a crapload of money.  It came out 6 years ago.  The sequel, pictured above, came out 3 years ago, but really it’s the same game.  There is other stuff going on, really cool stuff too.  And if there isn’t, that market segment is screwed, because you can’t sustain an industry when all anyone ever talks about in the media is one match 3 game that came out the same year as the Gamecube and original Xbox. 

Industries - especially fledgling industries - need their heroes.  Industries need companies who compete with each other, and those companies need to be able to point to examples of brilliance and say “That right there, that’s what we’ve got to beat”.  You need more than a 6 year (and climbing) window between iconic landmarks of innovation to grow an industry.  Now I’m not saying that nothing interesting has happened in the last six years in the casual games space, I’m saying quite the opposite, but the gaming media needs to stop pointing to that particular casual gaming poster child and bring some of the other orphaned children out of the cold (Like Desktop Tower Defense!).

Am I just deaf and blind, or is there an ongoing reason for this?

Kongregate

Kongregate will consume your soul and cause you to swear Oaths of Fealty.

As mentioned previously, I’m a huge achievement whore.  The concept of badges has entranced me since I was a wee Boy Scout.  I don’t take particular pride in showing them off to anyone, I just like having a record of tasks I’ve accomplished.  If you’re a fan of Newgrounds, which is the cradle of humanity for cool flash games, you’re going to lurrrrve Kongregate. 

Additionally, and this bit is kind of weird, Kongregate is the future home of a digital collectable card game.  The current manner for aquiring these cards is to complete an acheivement for a particular game for that week.  Presumably when the game is actually launched there will also be some mechanism for purchasing/winning additional cards for your deck.  Final judgement is reserved for when the game comes out.

On top of all that, It’s just clean.  Clean like Facebook used to be, you know, back in the day before they started plastering shit all over your screen like this was 1997.  Cleanliness is highly appreciated and improves the usability story tenfold.  Go check it out.