Tag Archives: Casual Connect

Casual Connect Europe will take place next month in Hamburg, and approximately 1,700 attendees are expected to attend the three-day event. The conference is an opportunity for industry professionals to discuss challenges and trends in the casual sector, and have a few beers together. Confirmed sessions include topics such as browser, MMO, social, mobile, and other genres. Casual Connect takes place February 12-14. Thanks, Develop.

Gabe Newell has said the reason the Valve plans to provide a full Steam client for Linux users is because the lack of games available is holding Linux back.

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Nintendo of America’s senior director of product development, Tom Prata, revealed that according to Nintendo research, that the gaming market could grow as much as 50 percent.

Speaking at the Casual Connect conference in Seattle, Prata stated that during the past two-and-a-half years, 30 million new gamers came into the fold in North America alone. This has brought the current player base to 143.7 million.

According to company research, the active market size of console and handheld gamers sits at 295 million and could grow by 150 million “if the right game came along.”

We’re just wondering which company will be the first to accomplish such a massive goal.

Via Edge, GoNintendo.

WildTangent boss Alex St John has told the Casual Connect game conference in Seattle that the current generation of consoles will be the last, making the prediction that video game consoles will be “extinct” by 2020.

“We are looking at the last generation of consoles right now,” he said, talking at the event this week. “I am going to predict to you that the PS3, the Wii and the Xbox are the last generation of consoles that you either see or that anybody regards as successful in the market.”

Big games publishers are also going to get caught out in the coming years, said the exec.

“Everything they know how to do is wrong,” he said. “They start in a well. They think that brand matters. They think that their marketing expertise matters. They think that a pile of art work and a box matters. They have got a bunch of people paid huge salaries with years of expertise who would never dream of firing themselves because they have got the wrong domain expertise.

“And so Disney, for example, would never have funded the $200 million project to build Club Penguin, but boy they paid $700 million like little b****** to buy it after it hit the market… So the weird thing is that the expertise and the skill set to create these games – they are not really rocket science to make – it is just an entirely new mentality. The big budgets and the money and all the stuff these companies have that are entrenched are not an advantage, they are an encumbrance.”

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