The Making of a Market
Anything but casual growth
In the late '90s and early '00s, the casual games sector was a distant blip on the radar of computer industry analysts. A mere $150 million market, it was the domain of dot-com start-up game developers (including PopCap), all struggling to survive with the "free games supported entirely by ad and sponsorship dollars" sales approach. The sector was fledgling, fragile and nearly wiped out in the '01 dot-com debacle.
Not so six years and an Internet revival later. With annual revenue surpassing $2 billion in 2007, casual games have rocketed to the forefront of analyst attention, growing far faster than the video games industry as a whole.
In PopCap's first three years (2000 to 2003), for example, consumer spending on PopCap games shot from zero to about $10 million. It quintupled to approximately $50 million by 2005, surpassed $75 million in 2006, and is projected to grow to more than $110 million in 2007.
Casual games are drawing more than twice the audience of "hardcore" games, such as first-person shooters, role-playing titles and video console games, and they continue to gain momentum among players and developers alike. Conservative estimates from firms such as DFC Intelligence, M:Metrics, Current Analysis and RC Research expect the casual games sector to grow more than 50% year-over-year for the foreseeable future, with revenue reaching $3-8 billion by the end of the decade.
Much of this growth is thanks to PopCap, who dared to launch the "try before you buy" sales model (now the industry standard), and who has increased casual games' credibility through cool, high-quality, original game designs.
