Hi,

today we going to continue with this series of articles about diferents types of revenue for game developers depending of the type of game or platform you are developing, if you don’t see the first one analyzing the revenue streams for flash games, click here

What are the casual games?

the casual games basically are downloable games with a simple and proved gameplay (as match 3, hidden objects etc..), there are some that tries to improve the gameplay to get a better user experience and get more attention than the rest, but need to be very careful for the type of target of people that play this games.

the target of this market is usually mens and womens from 25 to 45 years old, people that like to play but don’t have the time to waste hours in fps or in a RPG, so usually this games provide a fast and rich fun in 5-15 minutes of game and for a low cost (for the user it cost less than 10 USD).

what are the things you have to considerate at the time to develop a casual game?

there are a few things that you need to get in consideration at the time to develop a casual game, if you fail in some of them, can determine the success of failure of your project.

1. Polished game art: 99% of the games developer for this market are made in 2D, but that doesn’t mean that need to have poor art. not only the art need to be nice to view and polished, you need to add several types of effects to keep the user interested in the game and make the experience more rich in that 5-15 minutes of game
2. Old hardware compatibility: is known that the computers that the casual users have are old, 70% have a 950GMA intel integrated graphics card. this mean that the game that you make need to be very optimized and need to have a long QA in several old machines.
3. Light executable: this games can not surpass the 200MB of total weight, and usually is ideal to have a weight of 40-60 MB.
4. Improve but be careful: in this market is a must to improve in anything to have success, if you release a exactly copy of another game, going to lost in the thousands of games in the portals, the key here is to add some minor changes that can make the difference but don’t get excited, if you change too much things from the common gameplay of this games, the user can get lost and you going to lost a sale. everything depends in balance.

ok i understood what are the keys of a casual game, how can i make money from it?

sorry to say this, but you need to relay on publishers and portals. they going to cut a percentage of the sales revenue and is not easy to get published if you don’t have a background history making games.

the most known are big fish games, reflexive, iwin, but are many other, all of them have a developers emails where you can submit your game.

Conclusion:

this market is a risky one, the developments cost is high compared to the flash games industry, and you need to have a team of people maybe for a year or 2 working in a game to get something of quality done. even if you make it, still need to have luck with the portals/publishers and finally with the users. this is not the type of project for a newbie or a small team with no funding.

i hope this article has been helpful

Regards,

Shadow.