Just one day after I printed a rough ‘top 10‘ list of casual game portals, the top 10 has become the top 9, as Real Networks (i.e. RealArcade) has acquired Zylom. Zylom catered particularly to the European market, with localized versions of most casual games. Thanks to A Shareware Life for the original news.

Interesting quote from the article:

Michael Schutzler, vice president of RealNetworks global gaming operations, estimates that the casual gaming market is worth around $2bn to $3bn globally compared to the $25bn total games market.

That’s a much higher number than I’ve ever seen anybody else claim (typically, the estimates are $80-400 million). I suspect he’s including the entire mobile business, as well as other sectors of the business not typically lumped in with casual PC games.

The article states that Zylom has $8 million in annual revenues, and RealArcade had $14.7 million in revenues last quarter. Let’s annualize the latter figure to $60 million. So, the #1 portal has $60 million in revenues, and, let’s say that Zylom’s $8 million put it at #6 or so (lower than the estimate from yesterday, but that lumped AOL, Pogo, and MSN together).

One could make a reasonable inference that Portals 2-5 do about $20 million each, and 7-10 do about $5 million each, putting the annual revenues for the top 10 portals at about $170 million. Add in all the smaller fry below #10, and you probably get to about $200 million in annual revenue, currently, for the casual games biz (narrowly defined as downloadable PC games, excluding mobile etc).

$200 million sounds pretty reasonable to me, and roughly bisects the typical $80-$400 million range one usually hears.

There is no definitive source of data on the casual games industry, nor any easy way to guess how big the different portals are relative to each other. All the portals are, naturally, rather secretive with their data.

Still, this is the first list I’ve seen by a solid insider that looks fairly accurate. It’s a posting by what appears to be the head of GameFiesta (one of the smaller portals), posted here:

If I was to put a short list of the top 10 by volume (not performance) I would say
1) RealArcade (Gamehouse)
2) Yahoo Games
3) Oberon Network : Pogo, AOL (non exclusive), MSN, Xbox Life, and so on
4) Zylom
5) Shockwave
6) BigFish Games
7) Boonty Games
8) TryMedia (Because of AOL)
9) Reflexive Network
10) Gamefiesta, Arcadetown, Iwin, Wild Tangent

I threw the last nuch in at the bottem since most deliver around th esame volume. This is only my opinion but has about 2 years of trailing experience.

So the Steelers won yesterday - their 5th title in the 40 year history of the Super Bowl. Two other teams (the 49ers and the Cowboys) have also won 5 times in that 40 year span. That means that 3 teams, out of the 32 in the NFL, account for 15/40 (37.5%) of all Super Bowl victories.

That seemed very unlikely to occur by random chance and is likely to represent strong evidence of football ‘dynasties’ furthered by outstanding management at the teams in question (the Steelers have had one owner and only two coaches in the last 37 years). Being a numbers geek and a programmer, it was easy to whip up a function to check if this was just statistical fluke.

I ran a simulation 1 million times, randomly picking a ‘Super Bowl’ winner from among the number of teams in the league for each year (26 back in 1967, 32 nowadays).

Simulation results?

The top 3 teams won 15 or more games collectively less than 1% of the time (0.97% to be exact). So the odds that such a small handful of teams could collect so many trophies by random chance is quite small.

For Steelers/49ers/Cowboys fans looking to boast further of your teams greatness - the odds of any one individual team winning 5 Super Bowls were 1.088%. The odds of a given team winning 6, 7, or 8 Super Bowls in that time, by chance alone, were 0.223%, 0.039%, and 0.006%.

Here’s the relevant C code.

Bits:
I enjoyed reading Steven Gabriel’s blog, which documents his efforts to develop a couple of simple puzzle games - a Lumines-clone done with SDL (which is what I used for Bonnie’s Bookstore), and a Tetris-y variant done in Flash (playable in-browser here). Neither of the games is that great - they were clearly learning exercises for him, but his accounts of developing them are interesting.

Game Producer has printed a second excellent post with sales and production details for a casual game - this time the JewelQuest-like Match-3 game Christmas Bonus.

Pieces:
Here’s a nice Bonnie’s Bookstore review - it’s the longest review I’ve seen on-line so far, and, thankfully, is very positive about the game. Besides that, I’ve seen one nice print review (from a syndicated newspaper columnist), and I believe that print reviews are forthcoming in PC Gamer, CGW, and Wired. Still, casual games do not get reviewed to anywhere near the extent that traditional games get reviewed.

On the other hand, many of the casual games web sites allow user reviews, and there are a fair number of these up. Grab.com has many of them here. The downside is that the reviews can be, uh, less than thorough.

A good user review (in full):
His GaMe roCKs

and a bad one (in full):
ýt is a bad game [sic]

I’m not making these up - click on the link for more - although many of the others are significantly better than those two.

Casual/Indie game developers closely monitor two numbers:

The # of downloads (how many people have downloaded your game from all possible locations)

The conversion rate (the percentage of people who download the game who then go on to purchase it)

Your gross profits (excluding development costs) are roughly:

# of downloads
TIMES
conversion rate
TIMES
revenue per sale

Revenue per sale will be ~$18 for a typical $19.95 game sold off your own site (the $2 covers order processing fees), and about $6-7 for a typical $19.95 game sold off a portal/3rd party site (the portal keeps the bulk of the revenue)

There’s not a lot you can do to alter revenue per sale - customers won’t buy a $150 downloadable game, and you can’t squeeze the order processor or the portal much - trust me that many have tried…

So developers focus on # of downloads and conversion rate.

Typically, casual game developers expect a 1% conversion rate and are elated if they get to 1.5 or even 2%. But that’s for standard match-3 games, word games and the like. Specialist indie-game makers can see MUCH higher conversion rates, because often they’re the only one making a game of a particular style. Thomas Warfield, makes the game Pretty Good Solitaire. Yes, there are various other solitaire games out there, but his has 640 variants - it’s the definitive solitaire game for afficianados. He has claimed on public forums to get conversion rates well above 5%, and I don’t doubt him.

There’s a great post on GameProducer.net with a breakdown of downloads and sales for a game called Democracy, which is a unique political strategy game. The data shows the developer has a 13.7% conversion rate - better than 10 times the typical casual game conversion rate.

But there’s a trade-off. Both of these developers have specialty products, that don’t get wide distribution. As far as I know, the products are sold almost entirely on the developer’s website, and nowhere else. As niche products, with niche distribution, they get far fewer downloads - Democracy had 1,300 downloads in the month of June - a hit casual game can get 250,000 to 1 million+ downloads in it’s launch month.

Counter-balancing that, a niche game like Democracy may sell well for 5+ years. Warfield has been selling Pretty Good Solitaire for 10 years. At my previous company, one of our products, Railroad Tycoon 2, stayed on retail store shelves off and on for 7 years, even as typical FPS’s lasted 6 months or less on the shelf.

Pretty Good Solitaire and Democracy represent one end of the spectrum - limited distribution, long shelf life, high conversion rates, but low download rates. Match-3 style casual games are on the other end. For now, I’m working in the casual game space rather than the niche indie game space, but it’s interesting to get a glimpse of the other side…

Casual Game Interviews:

David Roberts, CEO of PopCap

Ken Wells, VP of Marketing for Big Fish Games

Jeff Tunnell, CEO of Garage Games, has a well-written, new blog

What I’m up to:
More puttering with the Mac version of Bonnie’s Bookstore (should be out very soon). Game concepts/quick prototypes for my next game.

Bonnie’s Bookstore is now on every major portal that I’m aware of, except Zylom (European portal that I think is waiting for translations to complete). This list isn’t exhaustive - there are a lot of small to medium sized sites that I haven’t listed:

Real Arcade
Yahoo
AOL
MSN Games
Pogo
PopCap
Shockwave
DA Games (UK/Euro friendly)
GameDemo
Games2Download
TryGames
Reflexive