Wednesday, December 24

CUGMOG, Coming in 2010

Casual gaming continues to grow and receive positive press, per this recent Economist article. The consumer trend for online content is anything short, disposable, free, and entertaining = viral videos, Twitter status posts, Elf Yourself emails, Funny or Die bite-size humor.

Add collaborative to these social media times and you have the recent casual game trend of social gaming (i.e. Facebook's Scrabulous, Texas Hold 'em, zombie bites, snowball fights, and too many more to list).

Add user generated to social casual gaming and you may have the Trend of 2009 in the making. The major video game platforms announced months ago that they were opening their systems to amateur developers. Since then, Microsoft launched XNA Studios, an online community for Xbox independent developers. Nintendo launched their WiiWare site for downloading independent games directly to your console.

While this may provide low-cost alternatives for the hardcore gamer, casual user-generated online gaming is keeping pace. The Wall Street Journal has a good overview. Two sites of note are Kongregate and Playyoo. The latter of which pushes the envelope by adding "mobile" to the string of adjectives, thus positioning itself as the Trend of 2010.

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