Just picked this up off gamasutra.com:
EA Enlists Former Activision Exec To Head Casual Division
Interesting. Seems EA has already had some sort of casual agenda, is this re-hashed old news or some new focus on going after the casual games space?
As far as i know they are responsible for the iPhone games.
And after a closer re-read I noticed the following which seems to indicate that their answer to the “what is casual?” might be different than mine…
“The common denominator is casual fun. Whether it will be playing Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix on the Wii with the family or downloading Madden NFL 08 on a phone, quick-to-the-fun games are bringing new players and new demographics to interactive entertainment.”
Does “shoving” (my term) a serious title like Madden 08 on to a phone suddenly make it a casual game? Is casual defined by the form-factor in which I play a game or the nature of the game itself?
EA already has Pogo for true casual games (in the Bejeweled sense of the word). I found this fascinating with the new hire:
Really? She’s worth that much?
Well, more than that I think those pay-scale figures show that EA thinks there’s a boat load of money to be made (duh). You don’t hire someone at that rate without thinking you’re going to make 10x or 20x or ???
Did you catch what one of her previous jobs was?
“Prior to her work for Activision, she worked for ConAgra Foods where she was senior vice president/general manager of the company’s snack food division.”
Mmmmmm, snack foods… </homer simpson>
Casual has been a buzzword for all and nothing for years. It’s like it used to be with multimedia. Those who know director, know what i mean.
In my opinion the best casual games nowadays are coming out either for consoles in rare doses and sometimes get famous like Geometry Wars did or only a few know them beside of some freaky lists as they are made by weird people for their own weird needs and mostly they give a damn about if they could sell it or not. Gameplaywise often these are the games that really make fun to play. If i would be a representative of a software company and would be looking for some fun stuff, i would digging right there. But pssst! don’t tell it to those people. ;O)
Beside of this there do exist the mostly known other side of the mainly portal driven casual games market (i’m leaving out the mobile market now) with mostly quite polished casual games. They almost fit into one of different clone folders and if they are well done they also sell well but they are less fun to play in my opinion. Also these guys are often so focused on making money, selling stuff and throwing around with buzzwords that a visit at an EA representative feels like a chill out area in comparison.
Anyway the market is big and a lot of people are likely to send a few dollars on stuff they don’t need to invest a lot of time into. If you look at the full price market then most of the dollars are spent on only a few top titles. For the rest it could be more attractive to do casual game or if they have the right concept like TTG go for episodic gaming.
Less big projects might also result into more new ideas so it’s interesting to see what will come out.
What i like about tools like Unity is that they enable people to do also some untypical games. To me some of the stuff i’ve seen in the showcase forum feels like the Cinemaware titles in the old days. Technically not perfect but interesting because it comes from a different angle. It has this handmade touch.
…interrupted
Executive jobs are often jokes. They don’t actually do much of anything. They merely make decisions - usually insignificant ones. You don’t need to hire someone for $550,000 a year to do this. The meaninglessness of her position can be derived from the fact she entered from a completely different industry.
Also, keep in mind, ‘Madden’ on a phone is a completely different game using the ‘Madden’ name - it’s just a brand.
That aside, casual gaming is the largest growing market. There’s a lot of companies trying to get into it, because there is a lot of money to be made in it.
It has it’s upsides and downsides. Upside are that there are more jobs, more projects, and new ideas. Downside is over hyping of the ‘casual’ buzz term and an over proliferation of what are ultimately bad games. Casual games have shorter production cycles than hardcore games (usually), so we’re likely to see alot of them. I have a professor starting a casual game company right now - but I’m in NYC and currently NYC is the casual game capitol. The good definitely outweighs the bad.
Casual games, are still conceptually being hammered out; it’s fairly clear, but it’s still a growing market.
Then there’s that space between hardcore and casual - the “core” gamers - and nobody knows exactly what it is. THAT is where the money is. 
It’s this thing that people keep refering to, but it’s very vague as to what it actually means.
a wee bit jaded are we? not that i want to promote the “big machine” but that’s just silly. ok it’s a very nice salary but i’m sure it’s a big responsibility. and she worked at activision…
“Casual games” means something different to different people. The “causal market” usually refers to the prototypical soccer mom, though, which is an extremely well-defined market with extremely well-defined likes and dislikes.
Look at some place that tracks portal sales (RealArcade, Big Fish, Yahoo), or at Flashbang’s own game site. These are casual games as defined by the casual industry: match-3s, hidden object games, diner games, etc. The hub of this market is Seattle.
It’s interesting that the new EA hire uses the word casual but is referring to a larger focus than download PopCap-esque titles. EA already has their Pogo division for that; I bet this new division uses Wii as a lever to pry open new markets.