Beyond the game

June 21, 2006 on 12:29 pm | In The Casual Games Industry |

If you read some of my previous posts, you could be thinking: “Sounds great, but get real! We sell stuff — that’s what we do. 20 bucks and away you go. It doesn’t get more sophisticated than that.”

I’d encourage any doubters to take a look at the ’serious’ gaming world — the hardcore games. With their Steam engine, Valve — the guys behind Half Life — have created a pretty decent preview of where we could head in the casual games industry. It’s not perfect, but it’s definitely worth a look.

Real Networks has tried to do something similar for the casual game sector with RealArcade, which does take a few steps in the right direction. It puts a tool on your desktop which helps you keep track of your games — full versions, demos, and new games available for download. It’s quite a nice idea but it basically stops there. But apart from organising your games, RealArcade is still basically about pushing new content on users all the time. This focus on selling to the expense of providing a richer gaming experience is its downfall. In my experience, many users get fed up and uninstall RealArcade.

We need to push this approach much, much further…

colin_head.jpgThe Little Gamer

2 Comments »

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  1. Hmm, when I saw your blog I thought “yes, another casual game blog, great, we need that indie game developers!” Then I saw your “about” page with this text “If you are just looking for fun then you should probably visit http://www.playaholics.com“. I was pretty surprised to see you focus on playaholics as it’s not the best games website out there, and then I realize that you simply promote your own websites in this blog. It will be very difficult to trust your articles and the links you promote, if you see what I mean…

    Comment by JP — 21 June, 2006 #

  2. Hey JP,

    Firstly thanks for the feedback. I think your comments are pretty fair too. However, this is a brand new blog and I’d really like you to give it some time. The objective is to provide a good, wide, casual game blog, with lots of levels. It’s really not about self promotion, but it does kind of have to start that way to put it in context.

    I take on board what you say about Playaholics too, that site is long over due for a complete overhaul. All I can say on this, is watch this space. A brand new and very sparkly Playaholics will be up in the next 6 weeks.

    I’m also very happy for you to recommend other sites/games/casual stuff too. Tell us who you think we should be recommending and why….

    Comment by the little gamer — 21 June, 2006 #

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