2007 Casual Games Summit

The 2007 Casual Games Summit
at the Game Developers' Conference
Moscone Center, San Francisco, CA
March 5-6, 2007

History

Looking at the lineup of sessions at the 2002 Game Developers Conference, you’d never have known that casual games existed, let alone were the most popular category of games. So when the Call for Papers was issued for the 2003 GDC, I proposed a “Casual Games Panel” that would teach everything there was to know about the design and business of casual games in 60 minutes. I enlisted Dave Rohrl of Pogo and John Vechey of PopCap to fill out the panel. A big part of the purpose of the Panel was to correct the widespread misperception that, “oh, sure, lots of people love to play casual games, but those people don’t PAY for games … there’s no MONEY to be made in making casual games.”

Well, 60 minutes was hopelessly inadequate to cover the material, so the following year I proposed it as a full-day tutorial, changing the name from the “Casual Games Panel” to the “Casual Games Summit”. The “faculty” of that first Summit, at the 2004 GDC, was 9 people.

We’ve come a long way since 2003. In just 4 years, anyone saying that there’s no money in casual games would be laughed out of the room. The Summit has expanded to two days with a faculty of 40 people speaking to a sellout crowd of 300 people both days, there are about 25 other sessions at the GDC that are partly or entirely focused on casual game development, there is a very active IGDA SIG, and there are even global conference series devoted exclusively to casual games.

--Steve Meretzky, March 2007

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