Kotaku: Casual Games

Looking for Some of That Facebook Money, L.A. Times Starts Hosting Casual Games on Website

Evan Narcisse — Tue, 27 Dec 2011 18:30:00 EST

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Casual games make money. The L.A. Times needs money. So, the L.A. Times is adding casual games to its website. That seems to be the logic at work in a new partnership announced today between the newspaper and casual gaming company Arkadium, which makes Facebook games Mahjongg Dimensions and Solitaire Heaven. More »

This Year's Most Popular Facebook Game Wasn't Made By Zynga

Brian Crecente — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 14:00:00 EST

Despite its tremendous impact on Facebook gaming, the most popular Facebook game of 2011 wasn't made by Zynga. They didn't make the second most popular either, according to Facebook. More »

Angry Birds, Happy Physicists

Brian Crecente — Mon, 04 Jul 2011 14:00:00 EDT

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Galileo discovered the language of nature. Einstein questioned the color of rainbows. Today's physicists ponder the vertical acceleration and horizontal velocity of an angry bird in flight. More »

How To Kill the Company Behind FarmVille

Brian Crecente — Fri, 01 Jul 2011 15:00:00 EDT

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Hate Farmville, CityVille and all of its billions of pestering, needy fans? There's a simple way to get rid of the company that makes those games: Kill Facebook. More »

Cooking Mama Barges Into Café World's Kitchen

Mike Fahey — Thu, 13 Jan 2011 11:40:00 EST

Every day thousands of players flock to Zynga's Café World, clicking on food and serving it to the virtual masses for experience points and in-game coinage. That's some sweet action right there, and Cooking Mama wants a piece of it. More »

Casual Gaming Destination Pogo Jumps To The iPhone

Mike Fahey — Thu, 09 Dec 2010 16:00:00 EST

Pogo has been drawing casual gamers to its website for more than a decade. Now EA's casual gaming hub makes the leap to the iPhone, bringing five of its most popular titles along for the ride. More »

The World's Coziest Video Game Launch

Mike Fahey — Mon, 06 Dec 2010 11:40:00 EST

Foregoing a lavish, star-studded party, PopCap's Bejeweled 3 launch party was held in a North London living room, with only a secretary, a grandmother, a librarian, a banker, and a father in attendance, representing the series' diverse fanbase. More »

PopCap Launching Casual Gaming "Disneyland" In Korea

Mike Fahey — Tue, 14 Sep 2010 12:40:00 EDT

PopCap Games, the company behind ridiculously addictive games like Bejeweled and Plants Vs. Zombies, has teamed up with MMO company NCsoft to create PopCap World, an online multiplayer social game service launching in Korea later this year. More »

Cooking Mama In Trouble As Martha Stewart Enters The Video Game Business

Mike Fahey — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 14:40:00 EDT

Is there room for two cooking, crafting and gardening experts at Majesco? The U.S. publisher of the Cooking Mama series has signed a deal to produce video games based on America's favorite ex-convict, Martha Stewart. I smell a cat fight. More »

The Revolution Won't Be Televised, It'll Be A Game

Brian Ashcraft — Wed, 07 Apr 2010 01:00:00 EDT

Think FarmVille meets real world activism. More »

GameStop Goes Casual

Mike Fahey — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 12:40:00 EDT

Video game retailer GameStop launched its Casual Digital Store yesterday, celebrating with a 50% sale on select casual PC titles. More »

"Casual" Is No Way To Label Games, Argues Casual Developer

Brian Ashcraft — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 05:00:00 EDT

Get rid of the term "casual"! Do it! Dave Thomson of Scottish games developer Denki wants the word gone, banished, erased, deleted. More »

Amazon Casually Launches Digital Game Downloads

Mike Fahey — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 10:00:00 EST

Amazon.com has officially launched the beta version of their Game Downloads section this morning, offering more than 600 casual titles for digital download, each under $10. More »

Casual Games Will Make Consoles Extinct - Clickz

Stuart Houghton — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 20:40:00 EST

"Digital Marketing" experts Clickz have a theory - casual games are becoming the dominant form of gameplay and are killing the console market deader than a particularly dead doornail. More »

Sunday Timewaster: the irRegular Game of Life

Maggie Greene — Sun, 09 Nov 2008 14:30:00 EST

The irRegular Game of Life is a weird but fun little game (by irRegular Games) based on mathematician John Horton Conway's 'Game of Life' theory. In this iteration, you are given puzzles to solve and must set the little cells into motion to meet the goals of each level. It's surprisingly hypnotic at times — after getting past the initial introductory levels, you watch the cells shuffle back and forth, creating a variety of patterns and interacting with each other. There's also a sandbox mode and some other features; the regular puzzle mode was plenty fun for me. More »

Wild Tangent Studios Boss Steps Down, Internal Development Cut Loose

Luke Plunkett — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 06:00:00 EST

You know WildTangent? The casual gaming specialists, fronted by former DirectX creator Alex St. John and long-time believer in the "casual games will soon rule the universe" train of thought, just announced that they are killing off their internal development studio, which had only managed to churn out three games in two years. The company's online casual gaming portal will remain, along with it's 1000 or so games, but it'll be staying without boss Alex St. John, who is stepping down from his post. The move was made to cut costs, with the benefits of developing their own games not seen as being as economically viable as simply hosting somebody else's. More »

Prototyping Challenge: Fishing Girl

Maggie Greene — Sun, 02 Nov 2008 13:30:00 EST

Danc of Lost Garden is back with another prototyping challenge; game designer I am not, but I love these things — especially seeing what people come up with. On the plate this cycle? A fishing game that Danc describes as "Frogger using a polar coordinate system, a frog that insists on drifting to the left and only the ability to move forward": More »

Sunday Timewaster: HDOS Databank request 01

Maggie Greene — Sun, 26 Oct 2008 15:30:00 EDT

This is a fun little remake (more or less) of the puzzle mode of Tetris Attack; you have a limited number of moves to swap blocks and clear the whole board. While the early levels are pretty easy, some of the later stages get pretty complicated — all in all, not a bad little browser-based timewaster to kill some time on a Sunday. More »

The Surprising Success of Retail Game Cards

Maggie Greene — Sat, 25 Oct 2008 17:30:00 EDT

I had an interesting discussion this week on the topic of microtransaction models, East-West interaction, and the fact that few people pay much attention to such issues (or dismiss them out of hand); Games In Motion has a nice interview up illustrating the 'fly under the radar' nature of a lot of those microtransaction models. WIM sat down to chat with Rob Goldberg, CEO of GMG Entertainment — the company produces branded pre-paid cards for a couple of franchises, sold at big box stores like Target — to talk about where the market is currently and where it's headed. They estimate somewhere between $75 and $100 million in sales this year, but what about the future?: More »

Cartoon Network Eying Chinese Market for Casual Games

Maggie Greene — Sun, 19 Oct 2008 16:30:00 EDT

Just joining the rest of the world in pursuing the magical (giant) Chinese market, Cartoon Network has announced that it is commissioning SinoTech, a Beijing firm, to create games based on CN-owned properties as well as SinoTech IPs. The games will first be targeted at the pan-Asian site and a site localized for Taiwan, and may find their way to other localized Asian sites and an in-the-pipeline portal for mainland China: More »

EA Rides Pogo To Austin

Mike Fahey — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 10:20:00 EDT

EA casually makes it's way into Austin, Texas, with the announcement of the opening of a brand new studio formed to create games for Pogo.com. Pogo Austin's tiny initial team of 12 are tasked with developing family-friendly games based on popular Hasbro properties. Their first game will be Pictureka! Museum Mayhem, due out on Pogo.com in November with a retail release to follow in early winter. More »

Sunday Timewaster: Marshmallow

Maggie Greene — Sun, 28 Sep 2008 15:30:00 EDT

This wonderfully adorable (and kind of weird) game is pretty straight forward — guide the marshmallow around a variety of objects just waiting to take a bite out of your head and send you hurtling towards the ground so you can land with a 'splat.' It's cute. It's not terribly taxing. The soundtrack is ... well, something (soothing? Weird? Vaguely Katamari-esque? All of the above?), but the game is really cute and a nice way to waste a couple of minutes or more .... More »

On Gynophobia and Misogyny in Games and Gaming

Maggie Greene — Sat, 20 Sep 2008 16:30:00 EDT

Over at Acid for Blood and Feminist Gamers, there are two interesting essays on the shooter/action game Cunt, which involves dastardly female genitalia (looking, as the FG article pointed out, "for all the world like a wizened creature out of the H.R. Giger convalescent home for aging genital monsters") and a player tasked with causing 'bloody cunt damage.' And it's not just a hack job from an amateur, being published by Newgrounds (of Alien Hominid and Castle Crashers). As pointed out in both spots, this game is a rather graphic representation of a fear of women that goes back a very, very long time, and, as pointed out at Feminist Gamers:

But as easy as it would be to point to a game like Cunt and say "golly gosh, anyone who plays this game certainly does have more than a few bound-for-your-personal-library issues with female sexuality," (and holy shit, is it ever), we have to take a step back and survey the landscape, so to speak. Because this game is not unique, it's not a one-off… it represents a very real and tangible culture of hatred of women that exists within the gaming community. After all, if the developers thought no-one would play the game, they wouldn't have made it in the first place.

The Acid for Blood piece opines:

However, Edmund McMillen is not just some basement coder or armchair designer. McMillan had a hand in the early development of current Xbox 360 indie darling, Braid, and he co-created the critically praised indie game, Gish. He is a professional game designer (or he has professional aspirations) and he not only thought that Cunt was a good idea, but he thought gamers would play it. Though it is a basic shooting game, Cunt has polish. Not only did people play it, but McMillen was lauded for Cunt:
Were you happy with the response for the game? I was honestly blown away by it. I really thought people would just write it off or get mad. Somehow it turned into something "punk", and was accepted by the "scene". Too bad the gameplay was lacking. If I knew it was going to get such a positive response I would have designed something more innovative and new for the gameplay.
The reception Cunt got amongst gamers shows how accepted, established, and insidious misogyny is in gaming culture. Cunt is not an isolated case.

Of course there are plenty of (male, heterosexual) gamers who aren't gynophobic misogynists, and there are plenty of misogynists running around who have never picked up a game (never mind Cunt in their life); but there is a pervasive bit of sexism that runs around the community that can be extremely off putting on a number of levels. The fact that so many conversations about issues like these devolve into name-calling and hateful bullshit almost immediately doesn't help matters. C*nt (the Game): Gynophobia and Misogyny [Acid for Blood]; Gamers and the vagina - the final boss? [Feminist Gamers] More »

THQ Bringing 'Dragonica' to North America

Maggie Greene — Sat, 20 Sep 2008 12:30:00 EDT

The flow of free to plays coming from Asia to Western markets doesn't seem like it's going to stop any time soon; THQ has announced plans to bring Dragonica, a Korean-developed casual MMO, to North America next year in partnership with Chinese game operator ICE. Dragonica will be free to play, supported by pay-for-content and microtransactions, and is a 3D side scrolling game. From what I've seen of it, it looks sickeningly cute. Will we have another MapleStory-esque sleeper hit on our hands? Full release after the jump. More »

The Promise of User Created Content - the Kodak Effect

Maggie Greene — Sun, 14 Sep 2008 15:30:00 EDT

Ian Bogost has an interesting essay up comparing the flowering of user generated content to the Kodak Brownie camera — in comparison to the unwieldy early cameras, the Brownie brought snapshots to the people. Simple and portable, it allowed people to create their own personal snapshots, something that Kodak capitalized on. In much the same way that Brownies allowed non-professionals to photograph personal moments that had a limited audience, so too does user generated content allow people to create digital 'snapshots.' That is, with the introduction of tools that just about anyone can use, people are able to create things that have personal meaning, but probably little meaning to the world at large. But meaning — and quality — aren't the point here: More »

Traversing the Audience Gap

Maggie Greene — Sat, 13 Sep 2008 14:30:00 EDT

Chris Bateman of Only A Game has spent a not insignificant chunk of time talking about the 'hardcore/casual' divide — especially in terms of discussing the accuracy of such a distinction. As he points out, more complex models of how people like to play their games are simply too unwieldy to be of use for general conversation; still, a lot of the ideas about what makes a 'hardcore' player versus a 'casual' player don't necessarily stand up when looking at certain (admittedly self-reported) studies, like the DGD1 & 2 questionnaires: More »

Breaking Through the Retail Glass Wall

Maggie Greene — Sat, 06 Sep 2008 15:00:00 EDT

The typical method of keeping games in glass cases works like a charm when it comes to reducing theft, but stymies impulse buys — something the game industry is working to change as companies attempt to appeal to ever broader markets. The San Jose Mercury News has a reasonably interesting short piece on what companies are doing in an attempt to broaden their appeal, get games out from behind glass and locks, and encourage people outside the target 'gamer' audience to pick up games on a whim. Of course, there's the problem of dealing with retailers' wants and needs: More »

Holiday Timewaster: Hexiom Connect

Maggie Greene — Sun, 31 Aug 2008 17:00:00 EDT

Hexiom Connect is a pretty intuitive browser-based puzzle game; you have to rearrange hexagons on the board so that all the colored lines are connected. There are 40 levels (and even a colorblind option, so if you can't tell the difference between red and green, never fear), so I've spent quite a chunk of time this morning clicking, clicking, clicking the minutes away. More »

Ubisoft: Europe More Important than U.S.

Owen Good — Sun, 31 Aug 2008 12:00:00 EDT

As one commenter elsewhere points out, must be Europe buying all these Imagine titles, because for Ubisoft it's a bigger market than the U.S., "by more than five percent," said Ubi CEO Yves Guillemot in an interview with Gamesindustry.biz. More »

Weekend Timewaster: FkConflict

Maggie Greene — Sun, 24 Aug 2008 18:30:00 EDT

A simple and scaled-down strategy game (it was an entrant in the 'Java4K competition,' where entries could not exceed 4096 bytes), FkConflict is still a lot of fun and good to while away a chunk of time that you probably should be doing something else with. The mechanics are pretty simple: pick your territories; territories get turns each round in random order; first player to get all territories on the board wins. More »

Narrative Versus Fiction: The 'Dash' Examples

Maggie Greene — Sat, 23 Aug 2008 17:40:00 EDT

Emily Short has an interesting response up to some comments made by Playfirst's John Welch in a recent Gamasutra article. The issue at stake? Welch's assertion that Playfirst has introduced 'narrative' to games such as Diner Dash. Short's response? 'This made my eyelids twitch.' What's the difference between narrative and fiction? Short argues that games like Diner Dash have a fiction attached to them, but are sorely lacking on the narrative bit, which she feels can add something to currently lacking casual games: More »

Saturday Timewaster: Attention Hog

Maggie Greene — Sat, 16 Aug 2008 15:30:00 EDT

From Chris Basmajian comes a darling, piggieful little game called Attention Hog. As the titular attention hog, your job is to capture the attention (and love) of as many people as possible, while avoiding bacon and nabbing power ups to make your job a little easier. Basmajian says the game "reflects some of the social and psychological trends present in social-networking communities, including self-promotion, social anxiety, obsessive need for peer validation, and distraction as entertainment." Heavy stuff. Ian Bogost notes that while he's "happy to see a game that critiques today's attention culture, but I'm not sure Attention Hog reaches the level promised in the description." Still, while I'll admit to being a sucker for cartoonish pigs (my little Monokuro Boo collection is probably a touch unseemly for a 25 year old), it's adorable and worth a few minutes of time on a lazy weekend. More »

'Going Rogue': Leaving the Mainstream Behind

Maggie Greene — Sat, 09 Aug 2008 16:30:00 EDT

The Escapist has an interesting article up on mainstream industry types who went indie — it delves into the reasoning behind a move, as well as the challenges and the positive aspects of moving from big studios to independent development. People making the transition have had to unlearn 'mainstream' habits or pick up new skills (like learning the tools of the PR trade) — and even with the plethora of portals and distribution options, the 'independent' distribution channels are still fraught with pitfalls, from distribution limitations to piracy: More »

Saturday Timewaster: Now Boarding

Maggie Greene — Sat, 09 Aug 2008 15:30:00 EDT

While the weekend timewasters at Kotaku are generally free, and Now Boarding — an indie time management/sorting game that has a nice, slightly retro aesthetic — isn't, the demo is lengthy and engaging enough to waste an hour or two on a lazy Saturday. The point of the game is to manage your airport empire and keep the poor slouches stuck at the terminal or on the plane reasonably happy, or at least not hopping mad. The $20 ($15 right now) price tag for the full version seems a little steep, but the demo portion has already gobbled up time this morning that I should've been dedicating to plowing through another couple of thousand pages on Japanese colonialism. Frankly, sorting flights is a hell of a lot more fun — and this is a nice, reasonably polished little game that is fun to play. More »

Indiecade 2008: Winterbottom! Gravitation! And More!

Maggie Greene — Sun, 27 Jul 2008 18:40:00 EDT

During my practically nonexistent downtime, I wandered down to check out the offerings at the E3 installation of Indiecade 2008. Indiecade is, as the name implies, a celebration of a variety of indie games ranging from 'art games' to more mainstream-type titles. We've covered at least two of the games here on Kotaku — Jason Rohrer's Gravitation and The Odd Gentlemen's The Misadventures of P.B. Winterbottom (begun as an MFA thesis at the University of Southern California). I had a chance to check out some of the games, talk to the people behind Indiecade, and watch the goings on — which included a surprising amount of hubbub and talent scouts from several companies lurking around. And there was more than just games: art prints were featured from various games (I even spied a screen from Blueberry Garden), plus videos of ARGs and installation games. My impressions and some pictures after the jump. More »

Literature and Games: 'Playing the Reader'

Maggie Greene — Sun, 27 Jul 2008 17:40:00 EDT

I really like the idea of turning classic literature into games, mostly in the form of parodies (but moderately thoughtful ruminations are welcome, too). Over at GameSetWatch, Emily Short looks at the literature/game combination in the one genre that churns out book-related games at an alarming pace: the dreaded hidden object game. She concedes that it sometimes works really well (as in the case of Agatha Christie novels, or Sherlock Holmes), but the disconnect between the narrative and gameplay in examples such as The Count of Monte Cristo is frustrating (she does offer the caveat that she's not a fan of the genre in general, but her criticisms still stand): More »

365 Days of Free Games

Maggie Greene — Sun, 27 Jul 2008 15:40:00 EDT

Bored this summer? GamesRadar has an appallingly expansive (10 pages!) listing of a wide, wide variety of games available for free, with just about every genre under the sun represented (including the classic 'Victorian slap-fighting game'). Many have videos and most have screenshots, so you can just scroll down and see what catches your eye. Organized into thematic groupings ('King of Pain,' 'Polychromatic,' 'Suburban Drama'), there's plenty of options to please any palette and more than enough games to keep just about anyone busy for a long, long time. More »

China's FerryGame Hiring Former EA Heavy Hitter

Maggie Greene — Sat, 26 Jul 2008 15:40:00 EDT

A number of Chinese companies are nothing if not shrewd — in a smart business move, FerryGame has hired former EA executive producer and Heavy Iron founder Steve Gray to oversee their product lineup and future forays into the MMO/'advanced casual' market. Ranging from typical MMOs to a music/dance/'catwalk' game, FerryGame looks like they're ready to take on some of the big dogs of the domestic Chinese market, and Gray will surely be an asset: More »

Going For the Mass Market: Good News or Bad?

Maggie Greene — Sat, 19 Jul 2008 17:30:00 EDT

I've read a number of thought-provoking pieces over at Only a Game, and this week Chris Bateman has a meditation up on Nintendo, the 'mass market,' moving away from games, and what this could spell for the industry at large. Is it really all it's cracked up to be? Unlike most of my favorite essays from Bateman, this one is pretty short and digestible — he points out that aggressively pursuing the 'mass market' (casual market) is working out splendidly for Nintendo, but he wonders if aggressively targeting that market inherently means moving away from games. And what about the industry at large? Well, that's not so clear: More »

Is Exclusivity Hurting Digital Downloads?

Maggie Greene — Sun, 13 Jul 2008 16:30:00 EDT

Gamasutra has an interesting look at the issue of casual portal exclusives and how such exclusives may be hurting the casual games industry — and pulling developers into a no-win fray. Russell Carroll compares the digital milieu to regular retail establishments: "I can't imagine having to go to Target to get EA games and to Wal-Mart to get Activision games," and notes that this could be a good thing if it winds up being a Pepsi/Coke type thing (which, frankly, I can't quite imagine, since beverages and games are just slightly different animals). And what of the poor developers?: More »