Your Thoughts on the Future of Casual Gaming?

My wife, who is computer-savvy, dislikes casual gaming on the 360 for one reason:

The controller.

She’s so used to a keyboard and mouse that the analog stick or the dpad screw her up.  It doesn’t help that the 360 controller’s dpad leaves much to be desired, making games like Lumines inferior to the PSP version.

By the same token, she would play Viva Pinata much more if she could use a mouse and keyboard instead of the controller.

So two things would make her play more casual games on the 360:

1.  Make the environment more familiar to a Windows user.  If you’ve been playing bejeweled or snood with a mouse for 5 years, why are you going to switch to a controller?

2.  Make the controller better for casual gaming.  So many casual games rely on the dpad, and the dpad is just so poor.  

Finally: I’m sure microsoft has data somewhere showing what percentage of casual gaming is done at the office vs at home.  I suspect you’ll have trouble reaching a huge portion of the market, just because no one has an xbox 360 under their desk.

Good feedback – thanks! Does your wife commonly play casual games on the PC today?

Re: "It would be cool to see more card based games like Magic, Munchkin(and other Steve Jackson games) etc. on Live to play with friends and family."

Interesting idea. I wonder whether it would be easier for non-core gamers to pick up these sorts of non-traditional card games and learn the mechanics? Certainly makes it easier to find someone to play with!

I do want to say that I very much like the Xbox 360 controller.  The ergonomics are wonderful.  I really just hope there’s a slight revision in the future with a better directional pad, because the one in there sucks so much.

I used to play all my casual games on the PC – card games, MSN games, etc.

But, since purchasing an Xbox 360 last year, I’ve never looked back.  Casual games are so much better enjoyed on the sofa, with a cup of coffee, infront of my Samsung HD TV.

I freelance, so work from home, so it’s nice just to be able to have a quick Xbox Live Arcade break from time to time if programming is swamping my brain.  It’s nice just to get off the PC for a bit.

I’m the same with ‘actual games’ too these days.  Up until I had a Dreamcast (followed by the original Xbox, and then recently a 360), I wasn’t bothered about consoles at all and I was quite happy with PC games.  These days, I enjoy games from the comfort of my sofa.  The things that have changed my outlook on consoles is, funny enough, Xbox Live, and Microsoft’s own first party games and exclusives.

Plus, casual games on the 360 are so much better for parties and when you have friends over.  

I like the social.

The only game I’ve managed to get the missus to play is Hexic and Zuma, both of which we both enjoy and were more than willing to spend some points on.  What I’d love to see is games like Hexic and Zuma that hava a multiplayer aspect (on the same console).  Two player Zuma would be awesome.  Maybe you could should each other if there were sufficient gaps between the rolling balls.

Playing together is a great way for a veteran gamer to show the newb gamer the ropes.

I need to give Catan a try, looks good.

What might be cool is a multiplayer game in which each player can determine their level of involvment in a game.  For example, the veteran gamer might select the challenging fps part of the game whilst their friend who’s new to gaming might do simpler tasks like solve puzzles that assist their veteran gamer friend.

I’m going to say cell phone for casual games. There’s nothing causal about the games on Xbox Live Arcade. I want to win against the other players!

I think that there are a few games that have really shown their appeal to casual gamers and, perhaps becaue so many designers are men, we just don’t see many game designs that follow their “footsteps” for success with this market.

Look at “The Sims” – It is by far the most successful casual gamer game. When I’ve spoken to a girl that likes it (I like it too, but these are HER reasons), she said that she liked it because it felt like playing with a “virtual dollhouse” and this is how she grew up. Her experience as a girl growing up was all about playing house or acting out real-world relationships with her dolls. The free-world and the ability to customize things appeals to her fashion sense. My mother, who barely ever plays games, says she likes it because it is “easy”. She doesn’t feel disappointed like she does when in other games she is constantly dying.

Now look at successful Asian games that appeal to girls as much as guys. There are rhythm games and puzzle games that are honestly your “unisex” games as everyone likes to be challenged mentally, but there are also games that ask you to nurture a pet through simulated attention and love, and dating simulations that again, simulate relationships.

So here are the elements that I think should be in casual games if you want to appeal to women and/or casual gamers:

1. A focus on relationships between characters that are interactive.

2. Games with less traditional goals – avoid the death followed by the “Game Over” screen. Letting players choose their own goals in a sandbox, for instance.

3. Lots of freedom in choices/goals as above, but also lots of customization.

4. Make them easy to learn and start playing through. Difficulty in mastery is definitely okay as casual gamers are just as smart as the hardcore; they just aren’t devoted enough to spend time playing a game that immediately punishes them for not having used a control pad for years and years.

As far as genres:

1. Well, the whole “Sims” simulation. Why haven’t we seen decent clones with themes on them yet? I can think of about 50 ways to innovate and improve the Sims experience off the top of my head – also, Sony is doing it (look at Brooktown High for the PSP).

2. Dating sims – I understand that some of these are cheesey and offensive, but why hasn’t a western developer made one of these with cultural modifications?

3. Unisex games – Puzzles, rhythm, accessible action/adventure like Mario. . . keep the learning curve soft and the games not too twitchy at first. Put in lots of rewards like Mario always has.

This is how you break in a new IP, but on the marketing side – casual gamers just don’t play that many games and certainly never read up on games. They are nearly completely driven in purchases by word-of-mouth and IP loyalty. This is why the Wii is so incredibly successful. They’ve been in the game the longest and have the most IPs that are immediately recognizable and loved by many casual gamers.

Casual games are evolving so quickly that i believe they are going to fundamentaly change at some point in the next couple of years.

I find casual games to play through Wired’s game|life blog, and through jayisgames.com

With those two sites alone, There are more games posted every week than i have time to play.

But casual games for the most part lack depth. I know, that’s part of the definition… but at the rate the games are evolving, I don’t think it will be long before real depth in casual games is something we come to expect.

I have no idea how the payment schemes are going to work out, though. XBLA seems to be doing well, and even though i’ve bought a ton of XBLA games, most of the casual games I play in any given week are free games on the web.  

Even multiplayer can be found free on the web in simple flash games.  

I’m excited to watch and participate in the evolution of casual games. It will be incredible to see where this all leads us to in 5 years, and in 10.

There’s really three kinds of ‘casual’ games, as I see it, drawn in that classic figure of overlapping circles (since games can cover more than one of these). I define casual as anything where a typical session is of the ‘drop-in, drop-out’, might play for 5-30 mins kind of game. So XBLA, Pinata, socalled "light fare" (though often they’re surprisingly deep).

- Completable. Short action-y games with an end, like aegis wing or the TMNT arcade game. Street Fighter. These are games you play to finish, then play to finish faster or with more marbles or points or not getting hit or whatever (see ‘Goal’ games)

- Social. Games like uno, Hold ‘em, Catan, that are as much about chatting with other folks as winning. Classic board games mostly fall here. These games tend to be ‘friendly’, not so competitive, but there’s still a winner. These games lend to repeat play with different players.

- Goal. Wasn’t able to find a good name, but these are the games like PinballFX – where you’re just out to build the highest score. Hold’em could fall here (biggest bankroll), hexic/tetris, etc.

Games that cover at least two of these effectively seem to do well. We need more Social games.

It’s interesting that gender comes into the discussion, as if Puzzle games, Social games are a traditionally female domain. Maybe that’s the case, I don’t know. But I know that games that have really simple dynamics (someone mentioned wii sports) and a low learning curve are that gateway drug that gets people to try other games. Chess or Catan – simple to learn, maybe even simpler than Uno or Spades. Learning Catan may open someone to a turn based strategy game like HOMM or CIV. etc etc.

I’d suggest more cared/boardgame based games.  Alot of non-gamers still play alot of board games such as Risk, Monopoly, Trivial Pursuit, Yahtzee, Life, Scrabble, etc.  I think adding in more games that people already enjoy away from the computer/console would be an easier to way  to attract more casual gamers.  The price point around $4/5 isn’t that bad, and with XBLA you at least have the chance to play a little through the game to make a decision on buying the title or not.  

i think most casual gamers ever really play the same game over and over essentially the "trial" version or flash games are enough. your target should be a xbox owners with wives, kids, moms and make a game they would love to share with them. my girlfriend plays zuma and loves it but wouldn’t have played it unless i showed her. puzzle games are easiest to share IMO.

I realize I’m not actually bringing anything new to this argument but as someone who plays casual games on the 360, I just want to voice my support for focusing on social style games. While the old school arcade shooters and puzzle games are fun, for me the biggest draw of casual gaming is something I can sit down and just play casually with friends to relax.

More specifically I’m speaking about games like Catan, Uno, Carcassarone, etc. These are the ones that keep me coming back time and time again to the Arcade. The other titles are fun, don’t get me wrong, but the releases I find myself looking forward to the most are the ones that primarily feature casual multiplayer action.

Casual games are great.  My folks 60+ age loved the Wii bowling.  

Why did they play?   It was fun.

One game I think would be phenominal on XBOX Live is a trivia game like you see at local pubs, restaurants. Buzz Time Trivia…    

I think existing casual games focus on the individual still.  It is absolutely NO FUN to watch someone else play.

We need a new genre.  Multiplayer fun game genre.   What that is?  DOn’t know, but am waiting for it.  :)

If you really want everyone to gather around the 360 and play games, we need games that allow them to do that.  :)

The key to casual games for me is portability.  I want to have them to play whenever, where ever an opportunity presents itself.  Having them locked to a bulky piece of hardware like a console or a laptop is impractical to me.  SO i play most of my casual games on my Treo phone.  It’s the only device i constantly have with me.  A DS would also work if it were something I had everywhere, bit i imagine if i had a DS that it wold only be with me if i planned on bringing it, in which case i could also almost as easily plan to bring my laptop.

I have enjoyed some of the more social casual games on Live Arcade though.  Games like Uno and Catan are fun to play with groups of friends.  Agis Wing too was fun with 4 player coop and even gauntlet.  These provide a nice fun break from the more serious retail games.  I wish Vista would let me play these games on my laptop as well so they aren’t ‘locked’ to my console.  Having casual games locked to the console makes the opportunities to play them very very limited for me.  If i’m planning on sitting on the couch to play a game, i’m grabbing a retail game 90% of the time.

Casual games need to be play anywhere, play anytime.

Re: "For me, the biggest evolutionary step here would be making these games more portable.  I travel quite a bit and don’t idle particularly well while stuck in airports or between passengers crammed on a plane for hours at a time. Having an integrated solution for syncing a set of simple, distracting titles to a PDA style device or otherwise would be terrific.  One title, one purchase – Start a game on the couch in front of my HDTV, pick it up again while on a plane via a handheld.  While something like Nintendo’s DS would undoubtedly be fun, it doesn’t compare in my mind to a more cross-platform solution which supports a digital style distribution for games."

I totally agree – being able to buy once, play anywhere would be a huge step forward for casual gaming.

Re: "if you want to attract even more people, start having REALLY cheap games. Like 50 and 100 (<$1) points for a full game. Older / simpler games should be this cheap.

Games that are sooo cheap, you just buy them because."

Is there a quality bar beyond which you won’t buy the game? In other words, it costs money to make these games… in order to hit a really cheap price point, the game has to be significantly simpler to make.

Now… If that portable experience could also be powered entirely by screaming, crying babies and random snoring passengers, all the better!  :-)

I’ll second "Bigby Mike" here as well -

"I think its helpful to think of video games not as a new medium on the level of film and books, but as a relatively new implementation of something humans have always done, inventing and playing games."

Thinking outside my own sandbox, I could really see my grandparents and other folks jumping on the casual games market if the medium weren’t so chock full of "busy" experiences.  Something as ordinary as a simple recreation of checkers without the wizz-bang is a great example – Most likely not enthralling to a more modern gamer, but paced perfectly for another untapped segment.

I’m buying a PC soon, and I have this idea in my head, which I call HD Gaming. The idea is big screen high resolution games basically.

But its more than that. Its taking away the computer part of the PC and making it into more of an entertainment device that isnt so (emphasis) obviously a computer. I want something that can sit in the lounge (as mine will) and not look out of place, while providing an experience similar to a console – less hassles, less patches, more arcade style games with immediate pick up and play value. Thus the computer turns into an entertainment device, capable of similar things to a console, but the difference between the two in terms of looks and games offered decreases.

Another thing I’d like to see is a platformer in the traditional sense, such as Mega Man, that offers episodic content on a regular basis. Part of the content should part of a long ongoing saga, and part of it should be in the form of substantial standalone episodes. The idea is, platformers have been relegated to the background because the part of the reason they were made is technical limitations prevented more advanced graphics. Now we have overcome the limitations, but what if we revisited and reinvented the genre as more of an idea about how to express an idea than a technology limitation? Use advanced graphical techniques, use complex narrative and FMV, keep some of the gameplay aspects the same and enhance others, for instance allow players to aim with the mouse so as to avoid the feeling of limited available actions.

"Hypothetically, is it interesting to pay a little more to be able to play games across these platforms, and on different platforms?"

I think so, yes. My biggest qualms with XBLA is that I can’t take the games with me. There are only so many moments at home in front of my X360 that I’m in the mood for something casual as opposed to something more hardcore. But when I’m on the road, or standing in line, or in between conversations or just generally out and about, it becomes impractical to pick up a hardcore title that has annoyances like limited save points, etc. Casual games rule in that context.

So I tend to prefer my casual gaming on something I can take with me wherever I go, and be able to whip it out and put it away at a moment’s instant. Cell phone games are probably closest to this ideal. The ability to buy a casual game, and play it most anywhere I want, any way I want, is most appealing. And I think that most people would agree that that’s the future worth pursuing.

I’m lucky enough to have a wife who passionately loves games as much as I do. However, we’ve taken great strides to get our parents into our "habit" to varying degrees of success.

Whoever mentioned the mouse support was dead-on. Both sets of parents love to play games like Solitaire on the PC and no longer find the mouse intimidating (although they used to).

They like the Wii, but it’s not something that will just grab them.

They play a lot of Monopoly and Scrabble in their free time, and were big Tetris fans (I haven’t bought the new one yet). Lumines helped earn their trust a little.

Scant information, I know… but that’s my two cents

—

Cyberboy shall rise again

Sorry my response is so long; anyway…

I bought PGR 2 (used, for $10) just for Geometry Wars. I loved that game; you could play it while pretending to hold a conversation (until your wife gets annoyed at you for talking to her with a controller in your hand…)

I play some MSN Zone casual games; I am really looking forward to getting an Xbox 360 (soon as I finish my research, I promise…) for the XBLA games. The things I don’t like about MSN games are:

(1) Too many of the games ramp up too slowly, so every time you go back to play again you have to sit through the tutorials (“Hexic”) or play through four easy, tedious levels (“Bejeweled”) before you get up to speed. (I have read that Geometry Wars 2 deliberately avoids this problem; and even with the original Geometry Wars the first few waves are more relaxing than tedious.)

(2) Some of the games are too short. (“Cubis” is one, I think.) Also, you can beat the game without getting the high score badge; so where’s the replayability? “Cubis” is also too easy–you can beat it the first time you play it–but that’s a less important flaw.

The worst kind of casual game is one where you quit playing early because either it’s too boring (also, “Bespelled” has this problem) or because you finished the game so quickly. XBLA seems to be attracting some high-quality games (Geometry Wars 2, Catan, Lumines, Words), so I’m looking forward to those.

However, the biggest turn-off with MSN games is that they feel cheap. (Yahoo! and others seem the same way.) Either you pay a monthly fee–which seems a bit steep to me–or you pay $20 per game (which, although standard for PC casual games is high compared to XBLA’s prices), or you play a stripped down, possibly shortened Flash game on the MSN Web site, with video ads every 5 minutes.

The weird thing is that I don’t mind video ads in principal–I just don’t like the way they start late, or refuse to load, or get cut off before they end; and sometimes the MSN site loses your place in the game thanks to the video ad. The Web, I guess, is not the best software platform for ad-supported games.

James

In the  future, casual games will disappear.

I believe that in the future we won’t use the term casual games but instead, games that are currently classified as casual will fall under several different headings. I assume the term casual games came from a description of the target audience – not hard core gamers but casual gamers. We then have tried to define what kind of games this target audience likes and use this as a description for a casual game. In the future we will define the game by what kind of game it is not by the target market.

If a casual gamers plays puzzle games 20 hours a week, are they actually a casual gamer?

I work for NinjaBee. We develop XBLA games, The confusion comes because, while some of these games fit some people’s description of a "casual game" because they are smaller, they can be played in short bursts and the control scheme they are often enjoyed by the same gamer who plays some of the hard core games.

To predict the future of casual games you need to define what a casual game is.

I believe that there will be a much broader range of games in the future. There will always be room for big budget games with high-end graphics but with the boom of the casual market, we see that smaller budget games that rely on innovative game play can also make money. I think that the future will bring more variety. Big budget games, middle range games, and small additive games. Each will have its place and the term casual games will disappear.

I play casually on my pc, it breaks up the work I do on my pc.  I don’t play a lot of the arcade titles, when I sit down to play my 360 I’m wanting a more immersive experience. For the most part I consider hand held gaming casual, and I do my fair share of that.  I usually play while my wife watches ‘Law and Order’, etc, etc.  In that regard anything on the hand held (I use both the psp and ds), needs to be interuptable.  In this arena I see an evolution of casual gaming, to something that is persistent, but can be played in small increments; allowing more depth of story and play.

The only reason why I use the PC is because I am addicted to gaming blogs. I just don’t like to sit up close to the screen and play games anymore. I have better things to be doing like playing an amazing game on a huge screen. Heres the thing though. I’m not a casual player and I don’t really like to play casual games unless I’m waiting for a short download on the 360 or just plain waiting.

Its been said already but I love the idea of portable! Buying a game, playing it on a console such as the 360, getting far, saving progress, and picking up where you left off lets say waiting in line at Texas Roadhouse) on the DS or a MS made handheld(xboy anyone) would be the best thing since slice bread!