The Casual Games Industry Sucks Too
Ron Gilbert is a game developer I respect greatly. His work on the the old LucasArts adventure games (Monkey Island I and II in particular) was spectacular - the games are still awesome even today. But he also did a great job with "kids games" (many of which were ALSO adventure games) with Humongous, and he took a chance with Chris Taylor to create a branch within Humongous to create a brand for more adult tastes - in the form of CaveDog and their infinitely cool RTS game "Total Annihilation" (still one of my favorites).

He's got a short update on his blog today, with the great quote: "I was hoping casual games would be different, but it's just a smaller version of it's screwed up drunk older cousin. " Sad, but true. After the IGDA published their first white paper on the tremendous growth of the casual / downloadable games market, it seemed like new "casual portals" started popping up like dandylions about two fiscal quarters later, flush with new VC or parent corporation funding, all eyeing on being the EA of the next decade. (Nevermind that when EA was in its early days, it was actually very developer-friendly and COOL.)

It seems the majority out there are very much as Ron describes. They want only variations on a formula - "Checkbox Innovation". They want to commoditize the developers so that there's no brand identity beyond their own. They have set themselves up to be the gatekeepers (the ones through which the money must pass), and in a recent developers conference they made no secret of their belief that they were the new overlords, and stirred up a lot of resentment from the development community. You can read Brian Hook's Pyrogon Postmortem and see the "evolution" of the major casual games portals in progress. The events of the article are a couple of years old now, and the trend has only continued. As a friend of his put it, it was "the mainstream game industry writ small." Very similar to Ron Gilbert's observation. Many of these portals are very pro-actively steering the industry to make certain history repeats itself.

I've chatted with a few people from these casual portals, and at least the ones I've talked to have been nice guys who care about games. But I guess those are the developer relations guys. Some of these companies really are trying to break the mold. Even PopCap - the poster-child for casual games - is starting to break out and do some more 'core' games, like Heavy Weapon. I've been really impressed with Reflexive Arcade and GarageGames (which is really more of a developer-support business than an indie games portal). And there are guys like Matrix Games out there who are quietly plugging along in their non-casual, non-mainstream niches.

So it's not all gloom-and-doom. Just mostly.

Labels: Biz, Indie Evangelism

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