The Casual Crush Originally published in Game Informer Magazine, Issue 179, March 2008 By Thor Jensen Associate Producer Gamelab If you're reading this magazine, you more than likely don't play the games I make. My name is Thor Jensen, and I'm a project manager for a New York company called Gamelab. I work primarily in the "casual games" industry, those downloadable titles that you can usually play for an hour before you have to shell out any money. Those games that are played by moms, kids, and anybody who can move a mouse. Those games that aren't hardcore. Those games that everybody seems to want to make these days. In 2003, we released a little game called Diner Dash through our publisher at the time, PlayFirst. In the years that followed, there have been quite literally dozens of clones and knock-offs of the game, to the point that most major casual game portals have now created a "time management" category to house them. We won't mention the names here, but almost all of them feature an alliterative title and a female protagonist that the player controls by clicking areas on-screen to accomplish tasks. The difference between all of these titles is quite minimal - most of them feature the exact same gameplay coated in a different graphical style. When we released Diner Dash, a hit game in the casual market would stay on a portal's Top 10 list for many months, sometimes up to a year. Now, a title's considered a hit if it lasts more than a single month in the Top 10. A market that saw a game released every few weeks is now seeing multiple titles debuting every single day, often with several of them being nothing but clones of previous hit games. The massive crush of new games is squeezing the air out of the market, little by little. To compound the crush, more traditional developers and publishers have announced their intentions to enter the casual game space, both through downloadable titles as well as more traditional retial games. Electronic Arts acquired casual games portal Pogo.com and has created an entire division dedicated to developing original casual titles. Ubisoft is starting a sustained push into the casual market. And many other publishers are putting significant resources into exploring this new territory. The market success of the Nintendo Wii, which has eschewed the traditional gamer demographic with titles aimed at pre-teens, women and other non-gamers, has inspired many companies to plumb what seems to be a rich demographic. But is this overwhelming focus on moving product into the casual market laying the groundwork for another industry-wide collapse? The video game industry has endured crashes before - first, when the Atari 2600 drowned under a tidal wave of shoddily-produced games, and second when the Super Nintendo ended the 16-bit era amid a similar deluge of licensed product. The connecting thread here is simple - too much product released without sufficient attention to quality control. Software publishers were convinced that gamers would buy anything, and for a while, they were right. Unfortnately, you can only fool so many people for so long, and each time the market imploded on itself, dozens of studios closed and hundreds of developers were laid off. In the wake of the 1983 crash, several million copies of Atari's flop E.T. game were buried in a New Mexico landfill. These industry-wide crashes are deadly for gamers, developers and publishers alike. A similar trend is already developing in the existing casual market. Whenever a truly innovative title becomes a hit, it's only a matter of time before dozens of developers hop on the bandwagon, knocking out clones as fast as they can release them. Russell Carroll, director of marketing for Reflexive Arcade, recently posted an essay on website Gamasutra where he revealed some disheartening facts. After examining three years worth of sales data, he determined that clones of the three major casual game genres (time management, Match 3, and hidden-object games) outsell games with original gameplay mechanics at a rate of 20:1. If traditional game publishers attempt to enter this market without adapting their development methodology to accommodate this sad reality, they'll quickly find themselves drowning in a sea of product that they helped create, with nothing distinguishing their titles but the overhead that comes with a larger corporate structure. Am I advocating that developers and publishers "go with the flow," knock out clones, and enable this system to continue? Is that the only way to release a financially successful game in this market? Absolutely not. If developers do not prioritize innovation, there will be nothing for the rest of the market to clone, and the industry will eventually collapse inward on itself. That is one thing that larger companies could take the lead in, if they chose to. With the resources at their disposal, they could invest a greater amount of time into both development and testing than most casual development companies can. Whether that will actually be the case is anybody's guess. Experienced developers and publishers entering the casual game space is by no means a bad thing. The production values and design experience they can bring to the table will no doubt help create exciting, compelling titles. If they're truly serious about working to open up the industry to a wider audience of gamers, more power to them. But if they're just trying to jump aboard the latest bandwagon and pump more product into an already straining market, well - those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. Just keep me out of your landfill.