PUBLIC MARKS with tags 2006 & "jogos casuais"

WHO says you need a huge budget to create a great game? American game developer Phil Steinmeyer and Filipino artist Von Caberte certainly didn’t need one to create a casual game published by PopCap called Bonnie’s Bookstore -- and thanks to the magic of the Internet, they did it without even meeting face to face.

Formed by former members of Microsoft, Wildsnake Software has released a number of casual games over the years but later this year they will also be the exclusive publisher for new games created by Tetris creator Alexey Pajitnov. Gamecloud got a chance to chat with Wildsnake co-founder "Andy" (he prefers to be called that in interviews) to find out more about the company and future plans.

You get the same vibe off the most popular gaming sites in the English- speaking world, the casual game portals: EA's Pogo, Miniclip, Yahoo! Games, Microsoft's MSN Games, RealNetworks' GameHouse, Big Fish Games and many more. These lookalike sites are "portals" because they aggregate dozens or hundreds of casual games from many indie designers. Some big portals are mere front ends for faceless distributors like Oberon Media or Boonty.

Casual games, those five-minute diversions you play for a quick break but somehow end up clicking away on for two hours, have become one of the fastest-growing categories of computer gaming.

Portal para jogos casuais.

# Make it really hard. # Have a dozen mediocre game modes instead of one good one. # Make it a 600 MB download that requires two next generation video cards and 4GB RAM. # Price your game at $35 or $3.50 and sell only from your myspace homepage. # Use the right mouse button. # Give it a terrible name or theme. # Award low scores. # Expect users to read. # Make it challenging and cerebral. # Ignore what everyone else says about your game.

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

Você é um legítimo representante da geração Atari e sofre até hoje para se entender com as "centenas" de botões dos novos videogames? Acha esse negócio de game de computador "vício de nerd" desocupado? Foi fuzilado em cinco segundos na primeira e única vez em que tentou disputar uma partida de Counter-Strike com o vizinho?

Your gross profits (excluding development costs) are roughly: # of downloads TIMES conversion rate TIMES revenue per sale

At 44 years old, PopCap Games Chief Executive David Roberts likes to joke that he is "the adult supervision" at the Seattle computer game maker.

Rants about shareware marketing, the life of a shareware author, and everything els

Coming up with game ideas is a creative process without much structure to it.

Designing games everyone can enjoy

Brain Training could prove a hit with older gamers

"Jeff Tunnell and I've been "making it big" in the game business for a LONG time. MBG let's you learn, for free, the lessons I paid a high price for."

Trial version of game has been downloaded more than 200,000 times.