Casual gamers received their share of the limelight at last week’s E3 video games convention in Santa Monica and this booming segment of the industry got its own conference this week in Seattle.

Attendees at the Casual Connect convention were well up on last year and the Casual Games Association reported that investors had put $200m into the industry in the past year, with more than $35m invested in massively-multiplayer online casual games.

The audience is still overwhelmingly female at 74 per cent, but the CGA said it was broadening, with males taking up 50 per cent of the non-paying player segment.

Announcements in and around the show included Google’s plans to launch Adsense for Games, an in-game advertising technology, Microsoft Casual Games’ introduction of the GoPets virtual world to its instant messaging client and Electronic Arts’ announcement that its Club Pogo casual gaming destination had sold more than 100m virtual gems.

Oberon Media also completed its triple-play of casual games offerings with the acquisition of PixelPlay, which offers interactive TV games. It had earlier bought the I-play mobile casual games company to complement its own online computer game offerings.

King.com, formerly known as Midasplayer in the UK, announced it would be an exclusive provider of skill games for RealNetworks RealArcade service.

Skill games differ from gambling games, relying mainly on skill rather than chance, but they can have the same tournament-based play or contests with cash rewards. King has exclusive rights to skill games such American Idol and Deal or No Deal.

Its co-founder and joint chief executive Toby Rowland, based in London, and Los Angeles-based Robert Norton, head of business development, dropped into our San Francisco office after the Seattle show to talk about the company.

The two are well-known serial dotcom entrepreneurs in the UK, where their first company, Clickmango, was a casualty of the first internet wave.

King, founded in 2003,  seems on a much sounder footing, with VC backing from Apax Partners and Index Ventures and $26.5m in revenues last year and operating income of $1.4m.

"King is still very Web 1.0," says Toby, introducing his latest project MyGame.com, a site with Web 2.0 values of creating and sharing games that aims to address a younger demographic.

This has none of the ambition of MIT’s Scratch however - building a game goes no further than personalising an existing one with photos, but then we are talking casual gamers after all.

July 21st, 2007 in Games | Permalink