casual

Amazon.com on Tuesday launched its first foray into digital downloads for games. The new online store offers more than 600 casual titles without the need for physical media. Amazon says all the titles at launch are under either $6.99 or $9.99 with older titles leaning towards the lower end of the spectrum. As an added promotion, the company is giving away three free titles, which gamers have a week to scoop up before the prices return to normal.

The launch comes just a little over two months since Amazon acquired Reflexive Entertainment, a casual-game service that is … Read more

Kongregate is an anomaly in the casual gaming business. Where many Flash game sites feature card games and are frequented by a diverse population with a good percentage of women, Kongregate has hardly any solitaire-like games and has demographic of about 90 percent men and boys. It's where the shooter players go when they want to blow off some steam without firing up the console or the gaming rig, according to Kongregate CEO Jim Greer.

That focused demographic may be narrow, but it's also marketable. To engage this group more fully with the site -- and with sponsors … Read more

Game developer Oberon Media on Monday announced that it landed $20 million in additional funding from the Infinity I-China Fund to help it grow its mobile and casual gaming business.

Acquiring the funding is part of a global strategy by Oberon Media to expand its business overseas and establish a foothold in China--a key battleground for casual gaming services.

For its part, Infinity's investment in Oberon is just another example of companies trying to capitalize on the explosive growth in the casual gaming market. Casual gaming is a $2.25 billion business, according to research from the Casual Games … Read more

Video games reportedly can help cancer patients or awaken survival genes. Now, according to a new survey, people with acute depression and Attention Deficit Disorder are benefitting from games as well.

The survey--conducted by Information Solutions Group on behalf of game creator PopCap--found that disabled gamers make up 20 percent of the casual-game audience and play more often than others, citing health benefits as the reason.

PopCap, not surprisingly, makes casual games, and thus has a vested interest in the poll results. Still, the findings are worth noting.

The survey questioned 13,000 users on their video game use. … Read more

NeoEdge, a casual-games-based ad network company whose chairman is Atari co-founder Nolan Bushnell, launched on Wednesday a system designed to make it easy for Web sites to add a widget that links to its library of games.

The company, which previously built a system that "wraps" ads around casual games like Diner Dash, is now attempting to leverage the huge popularity of such titles by making it simple for any Web site to use its widget and become a front end to its more than 400 games.

Casual games--which can be played in a short period of time … Read more

The Social Gaming Network, parent company of social-networking applications that do exactly what the name implies they would, has reason to celebrate.

The company has netted $15 million in first-round funding from Greylock Partners, the Founders Fund, Columbia Partners, and Novak Biddle Venture Partners.

Yes, that's $15 million for the people responsible for the Warbook, Jetman, and Super Snake applications clunking up your friends' Facebook profiles.

It makes sense. Gaming applications have proven to be some of the most popular apps on social-networking developer platforms like Facebook and MySpace.com, and veteran entrepreneurs have taken note. The Social Gaming … Read more

Whoever predicted that social gaming was the next niche of the Web to get totally saturated was very, very right.

On Monday, a new casual-gaming social network called Mytopia entered its public-beta phase. Taking a conscious cue from massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs), Mytopia players create custom avatars and win points in games that they can trade in for virtual goods and real-world prizes, like iTunes and Amazon gift certificates.

Membership is free, but for a $5-per-month premium membership, players have access to an ad-supported version of the site and "grand prize" tournaments. The site already has … Read more

This morning at the Game Developer's Conference here in San Francisco, Alex St. John, the CEO of WildTangent, will announce a new version of the company's gaming software that he hopes will make people think twice about buying a video game console.

Taking a cue from the growing number of casual gamers buying consoles, St. John, who is most famous for helping create Direct X specification for Microsoft, figures that people are itching to get their hands on video games, but that they shouldn't have to buy a proprietary piece of hardware and pricey software titles, or … Read more

After being in private beta for the last three months, Playyoo is opening its doors for everyone this morning. The site is aimed at casual gamers who like playing games on their mobile phones. Like Kongregate, game developers can show off their wares and interact directly with the people playing them. Better yet, anyone without programming knowledge can use Playyoo's WYSIWYG game creator tool to create one of six game presets of simple games like pairs, tic tac toe, snake, and ping-pong. While the amount of customizations on these gaming presets is fairly limited, the titles uploaded by real game developers tend to have a little more depth. Developers with existing projects can simply port them over with a Playyoo-supplied template for Flash 8 Pro or CS3.

In terms of cost, if users find a game they like, they can download it to their mobile phones free of charge. The entire service is run by advertising, which shows up both on the site and on the games when you start them up.

What I really like about Playyoo is that it supplies each user with a customized "game stream" that can be tweaked similar to Facebook's newsfeed so that certain game genres show up more or less than others (get a peek at this after the jump). It makes it easy to discover new content as it comes in. Likewise, Playyoo users can send recommendations to one another if they come across something cool or worth playing.

Playyoo currently supports a pretty massive variety of phones. It's also nice enough to let you know how many games out of the entire library your phone can handle, along with providing a bandwidth limiter you can set to automatically cut you off of after burning through a set limit of data. While the graphics of the titles may not blow your socks off (like the upcoming Vollee service) you can't beat the price, and the potential for the game creator Web app is promising for folks like me with little to no coding skills.

More screens after the jump.… Read more