5/26/2023 0 Comments Super casual gamesNot sure if you know it, but Playrix, the makers of Gardenscapes, Homescapes and Fishdom, have been a in the PC casual game market about 10 years ago.” Some top mobile hits have very direct influences from PC casual games: “Think of Candy Crush and Gardenscapes - those are core casual games, and some very successful come from the PC casual market.So what kind of devs are still making PC casual games in 2022? We reached out for an interview with a leading PC casual game dev - Jorg Henseler of Mad Data, developer of Jewel Match Origins 2: Bavarian Palace (above) and Jewel Match Solitaire X, and he was kind enough to give us the following insights: ad revenue (some sites let players play the game as much as they want but they have to sit through ads.).revenue from minutes played (some sites give you access to many games for a monthly membership, and then devs are paid a share of the overall play time.).actual game sales (normally the player downloads a demo, and if they like it they buy the full game.). (Only 20% to the dev!)Īnyhow, there are multiple ways you can get money on PC casual sites, according to a source that we reached out to: But historically, PC casual game portals keep a minimum of 60% of total revenue, unless you get some kind of exclusive deal - and some of the portals keep as much as 75-80% of revenue. You might think that giving a 30% cut to Steam is unfortunately high. One surprising thing about the PC casual portal biz is the revenue cut. Here’s the breakdown that GameDiscoverCo did of the primary genre of the latest 50 games in iWin’s YouTube channel, as of mid-May 2022: The genre mix is also fascinating, and doesn’t map well to core popular Steam genres or top mobile genres of today. Look, it’s Vacation Adventures: Park Ranger 13: The kind of games you’re seeing can have a hilariously large amount of sequels, since you’re trying to get people to buy each game, or use their credits/subscription to play them. (We have anecdotal evidence: at least one Plus Discord member still buys these titles from time to time! Though one of our sources for this article mentioned “customers dying” as one source of attrition for the PC casual game space. So what’s going on? It appears that a small subset of the older (often female-centric) demographic of the original casual games boom 20 years ago just… kept buying PC games, and never transitioned to mobile gaming. Other still-existing portals include GameHouse and even WildTangent. Sites like distribute a new casual game every day, Big Fish Games still has a PC games section with many new games, and not all of these titles even appear on Steam. But then I got a newsletter from Boomzap, who publish new games like I Love Finding MORE Pups & Faircroft’s Antiques: The Mountaineer’s Legacy.Īnd I was astounded to discover that this market is still alive in 2022. Yep, I remember that, I thought nostalgically the other day. So what we’re talking about here is PC downloadable casual games that used to cost $20, back in 2006 or so. Some publishers and developers branded themselves specifically as casual game companies, like Big Fish Games, PopCap Games, and MumboJumbo.” In the mid-2000s, more sites specialized in game hosting and publishing, such as Gamesville and RealNetworks. The Wikipedia page explains: “Casual games started to flourish online in the 1990s along with the rise of the World Wide Web, with card games and board games available from paid services like AOL and Prodigy, and then from web portals, like Yahoo! Games and Microsoft's Gaming Zone. I fear that some people reading this newsletter wouldn’t have been around for the pre-smartphone ‘PC casual games’ boom. Let’s take a look at PC casual games - still a thing in 2022?! PC casual games - somehow still a market! How? This thumbnail is from iWin’s YouTube page, full of the latest casual game trailers. (Next links round-up will be on Monday, btw - this newsletter doesn’t have one, so feel free to skip if this isn’t your jam.)įirst for the ‘summer holiday’ series, a newsletter theme we’ve been sitting on for a little while, because I don’t think it has broad commercial takeaway. But as noted at the end of the last newsletter, we’re using this as an opportunity to try out some alternative newsletter subjects, in ‘relax time’.
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