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March 02, 2005
About 'Phil Steinmeyer’s analysis of Casual Games.'
I've stumbled on Phil Steinmeyer’s blog. Phil Steinmeyer is a game industry veteran, and the guy behind Railroad Tycoon 2 & 3. He has lot of interesting things to say about the industry, but I'd like to comment a bit on his vision on casual games.
In this article Phil Steinmeyer talks about the good & the bad of Puzzle Games, as Casual Games are often refered to. I’d like to make a few remarks on what he has to say, and more specifically what he suggests is ‘bad’ about the current state of the casual game industry.
He states there is
No feeling of ‘progression’ – Almost all of the puzzle games last 2-20 minutes, with no larger meta-game to encourage you to play it ‘just one more time’.
Well, if you take a look at the successful casual games, you clearly see that communication of progression to the user is one of the things that separates them from the less successful ones. Take for instance Big Kahuna Reef by Reflexive. Currently RealArcade’s nr.1 seller. This game clearly shows a good implementation of different levels of progression. For instance, if you finish six levels, you unlock a new fish species, which you can then add to your reef.
James C. Smith, the developer of Big Kahuna Reef elaborates on this principle which he calls James’ theory of multi-tier goal oriented game design in this thread on the indiegamer forums.
Furthermore, mr. Steinmeyer says
Virtually every game involves some variation on grouping shapes/colors/words to remove them from the board. This is fun for a bit, but if new users keep finding nothing but variations on this same basic theme, they will quickly abandon the genre.
Well, the numbers prove you wrong so far. The ‘match three of a kind’ principle seems to be holding up very well. Big Kahuna Reef is indeed a Bejeweled clone, with a twist. I’m not saying this is a good thing, but it shows that the crowd that buys casual games is not looking for originality (What are they looking for then? What makes them buy? I’ll try to dig into this in another post.)
Licensing needed – OK, I’m pretty reluctant to even suggest this, but the downloadable market needs to explore licensed content/stories/brands.
Well, in fact there are casual games that have gone this road. Take e.g. a look at
Spiderman 2 : Web of words
Scrabble Rack Attack
Wheel of Fortune
And that’s just looking at MSN Games. Does this model work as well as in console and retail gaming? I guess time will tell, but so far, non licensed content seems to be doing pretty well!
Posted by Dominique at 10:42 AM | Comments (0)