Casual games are different
published: Friday, 18. September 2009
Think about your audience.
That was the first lesson in making casual games from Christopher Natsuume, creative director of indie developer Boomzap Entertainment. A former AAA-game developer, he gave a humourous presentation at GCA on what makes casual games tick.
The first thing is to not think of players of casual games as “gamers”. A game that looks as simple as the popular Zuma or Mystery Case File – and indeed any casual game – is easy to get wrong, he warned.
He said: “We were AAA developers and thought we could do a casual game...we were going to blow the competitors out of the water, we thought.”
So he designed a keyboard and mouse interface that played very well on his casual game, only to sell less 1,000 copies of it – a failure compared to the millions sold for popular titles.
“We didn't know our audience,” said Natsuume. The audience was a “58-year-old retired person” who liked socialising online and interested in games but was not a “gamer”.
The player for a casual game is not a hardcore console gamer, he pointed out, to laughter in a conference room at Suntec Convention Centre.
The second lesson, he shared, was to think hard about where users download these casual games, for example, at the Bigfish games website.
Yet another lesson: don't reinvent the wheel. He pointed out the many clones to Bejewelled that are online now – all doing nothing much more than copy the gameplay of the popular game – as success of a “common” game with no breakthrough features.
Natsuume also asked provocative questions: do developers always have to include new features like great sound effects, for example? Do developers have to try to change the comfort zone that players are used to?
These questions are usually answered with a yes for ambitious developers, said Natsuume. However, for casual games, it may pay to keep coming up with similar versions of a game that has made it, he pointed out.
Finally, a last lesson: unlike regular game developers which quickly go get funding for the next round of games after a title is published, casual games have to be “milked” or commercialised for longer periods.
“It's not just about finishing a game when it comes to casual games – it's about monetising the property,” said Natsuume.
This could mean squeezing another US$5,000 a month out of a game, for example, by selling it to be put up on a handheld or on a plane's inflight entertainment system.
