The Failure of Independent and Casual Games

This is really just food for thought. I’ll also toss in some game ideas at the end I’ve always wanted to see

The Independent and/or Casual Games market is no longer casual, nor independent. I’ve known this for a few years, but I never saw how bad it affected some developers until recently. Another developer friend of mine recently submitted a wonderful game design prototype to one of the biggest publishers of independent, casual games and was turned down with the some of the following reasons:

As a leader in the Casual Games industry we have a very strong understanding of what our customers are looking for and these types of games generally do not resonate well with our audience.

That’s quite understandable, the game was pretty unique in design. But they went on to reason:

The Casual Gaming audience is almost entirely female with most over the age of 35. As such, the most popular genres on our site are Hidden Object, Time-Management, Sims, and Adventure games.

With that said, other types of games do not mesh well with the Casual/Independent demographic. Although we have seen success with other types of games in the past, we have seen a significant decline in their performance as our users move away from traditional casual games.

Okay, starting to sound like another sector of the gaming industry already… but let’s get a bit more detailed:

“The Casual Gamer wants games that offer them a very rich experience in which they can lose themselves and become as engaged in them as they would a good novel.”

Maybe I’m confusing independent games with casual games. I’m not sure. But having tons of extra content added on and catering the market to stereotyped games for stereotyped audience sounds a bit closer to core gamers to me. Doesn’t it? Besides, adding a storyline like a good novel? Doesn’t seem very casual anymore.

I had some high hopes for the Casual Games market, until I saw that it was being cornered by all of the big casual games developers and I heard from a lot of my developer friends that the publisher is basically deciding which games they will develop next, without any creative freedom. Which takes away from the games being Independent and Casual (in my opinion) in the first place.

There are still lots of wonderful game designs I would still love to see/do from the Independent (I guess, non-Casual?) Developers like:

Late Night Talk Show Host: Choose your guests for the night, music, programming, interview questions, responses to the guests answers, etc

Sushi Shop (Lemonade Stand)* There have been sushi games, but nothing close to what I want to see

Architect game not based on physics, but on aesthetic design of different architectures for different applications.

News Anchor game, select the most important events for the show, how to present them, the order of the news, etc.

Con-Artist (like the characters in Ocean’s 11, not GTA)

Fortune Teller, very similar to Con-Artist, but with a different theme, and based on actual occult nonsense.
Game for Girls (from my research, Girls love role-playing different jobs they will never do or always wanted to do) such as:

Flight Attendant, seating arrangements, distributing the drinks, helping with luggage, catering to grumpy customers, etc

Hospital Nurse (caring for patients with all the stuff Doctor’s don’t do)

Hair Stylist/Makeup Artist, tons of ideas for these

Tour guide/Travel agent; can be combined into one game where you decide the itinerary for the customers, and then guide them on the actual trip.

Flower Arranger (apparently, this is huge for wedding planning and girls want to do it and would be really easy to implement)

Patissier (Confectionery/Pastry/Chef); designing pastries, balancing ingredients for different tastes of customers, etc

That’s enough for now. In any case, there are plenty of great game ideas, plenty of talented developers, and very few places for them to distribute them. The largest indpendent/casual gaming site that I know of is Game Tunnel. But even these days, it seems that much of their advertising revenue and developers would be coming from all of the big publishers. So once again, independent developers will have to create another independent niche outside of what was independent gaming.