The casual gaming opportunity

Just recently I was raving about how it’s never been a better time to be an independant producer of content. I was talking specifically about being an indie film director, but the statement holds true for almost every field I can think of. Wagner James Au of GigaOM reports that this is truer than ever for gaming. He dissects Next Generation’s list of the top 100 bestselling PC games since January 2000 and he discovers that the “casual/kids/education games sell well– often better than hardcore games.” The funny thing is, you wouldn’t expect this if you only looked at which games cost the most and get the most press attention. The point is, a great game doesn’t need a huge budget and two years to complete. If it’s fun, it’s fun, period. And with new tools coming out for developing games cheaply for consoles, it won’t just be the PC that sees huge successes coming from independant producers.