Casual Game Box Office

Gregg Seelhoff has an interesting post about a current thread on a Casual Games mailing list where people want to start a best selling list for casual games.

One recent (ongoing) thread deals with the prospects of an accurate/viable listing of top casual games, based on figures from the major game portals. The discussion started with an interesting listing created by one person compiling "Top 10" ranking information published by the portals. It then veered into the accuracy and bias of this data, into a call for actual sales figures like the movie industry, and then onto the technological and political (for lack of a better word) issues for creating such a list. One can view the January 2006 Archives to read the whole thread, Top Download List.

The problem with the ensuing discussion, however, is that everybody is so fascinated with rankings, scores, and numbers that they miss the fundamental question:

Why?

Gregg then gives his reasons why he thinks such a list would be bad.  He also correctly points out that the lists people are creating for this are totally portal-centric and completely ignore sales from non-portal sources (to some people in the industry, non-portal sales don't exist, they can't even conceive of them).

There are two basic reasons why some people want this list.

1) They want to see what the top selling games are so that they can make a clone game exactly like them. 

Having a top sellers list would make it much easier to research what the best selling games are, therefore saving a lot of time in the cloning process.  This way there could be copies of any best selling game out within weeks or a couple of months, rather than the current longer wait.

2) Such a list would make it easier to get venture capital money.

There is a lot of hot money flowing into the casual game space right now, and a best sellers list would make it easier to draw up fancy business plans to part the VC fools with their money.  Without a nice guide saying "if we make this type of game, we'll get 1% of the market", VC and angel investors might be a little leery of investing in a business that looks suspiciously like the hit driven movie business.  A best sellers list will help show what's hot so that the hot money knows where to go.

Increasingly it seems there is a building to flip attitude in the casual games area.   This is not going to come to a good end.  We are headed for the big blowout of the bubble now and when the bubble pops and the music stops playing, a lot of the newcomers aren't going to find a seat.

Comments

[Mike]

Implicit in your point 2) is the assumption that the only people considering entering the casual games space at this point are cynical opportunists. Why would you think that? That's a gross generalization. You need to back up your "it seems."

The simple fact is that it does not at present appear to be possible for an outsider to predict even within a order of magnitude how much money one can expect to make developing casual games. Good guys need financial plans when launching business ventures just as much as bad guys do. It's business 101.

You and everyone else sitting on the data are completely within your rights to do so, obviously. But I don't think you can make the argument that a lack of financial data which creates a barrier to entry for well-intentioned outsiders is anything other than bad for the industry.

[Tim]

Such top 10 was already created. Today we have first public release. More info at: http://www.logler.com/2006/04/10/global-casual-games-top-10-first-public-release-week-2/