Rebel Entertainment Shows Off Casual Games Infographic

[Encaen]

Rebel Entertainment Shows Off Casual Games Infographic

[http://cdn.themis-media.com/media/global/images/library/deriv/413/413465.jpg]

Despite setbacks by behemoths like Zynga, casual games are still going strong.

Rebel Entertainment, which broke onto the scene with the playfully casual action-RPG, Dungeon Rampage, has created a handy infographic detailing the goings on in the casual games industry in 2012, broken down by month. Leading with Super Meat Boy selling more than 1 million copies at the beginning of January, the infographic focuses on some of the huge numbers in the casual games space.

January was a good month for casual gaming, with Temple Run seeing 20 million downloads, and the Casual Games Association predicting the social game market to hit $8.64 billion in 2014, which is a sizeable chunk of the $60-something billion dollar videogame industry as a whole. Then in February, it states that a Parks Associates study showed that the US gaming population had nearly tripled since 2008 though no specific numbers were provided, while Zynga was teaming up with Hasbro to make board games out of videogames based on other board games.

Early in May Angry Birds apparently hit 1 billion downloads, which translates to a lot of birds being slingshotted at even more pigs. Later on in July, Ouya's Kickstarter raised a cool $3 million in just two days in a bid to bring casual gaming to your living room. Finally, rounding out the year in November, Rebel Entertainment's own Dungeon Rampage surpassed 5 million registered users.

So, perhaps the whole infographic is just a nifty way of telling us that Dungeon Rampage has 5 million registered users, but if more companies would put together awesome infographics like this to share these updates, I expect we'd all be a bit better informed and quite entertained.


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[sethisjimmy]

I feel like this confuses indie games with casual games. For instance I wouldn't really consider Super Meat Boy, The Walking Dead, Journey, Minecraft or Castle Crashers to be casual games. SMB in particular is renowned for being one of the hardest games in years. But that's just me.

 

[Vrach]

There's a lot of games there that lead me to believe the guys who made the infographic had somehow mistaken the word "indie" for the word "casual".

 

[chstens]

I feel like this confuses indie games with casual games. For instance I wouldn't really consider Super Meat Boy, The Walking Dead, Journey, Minecraft or Castle Crashers to be casual games. SMB in particular is renowned for being one of the hardest games in years. But that's just me.

If "casual" wasn't a term devoid of meaning already, this is the final nail in the coffin... then again, "indie" is going down the same path. I still don't get how Sony-published Journey qualifies as "indie", either.

Pretty much this. I would define any game you can very easily just pick up and play for a bit with little to no impact as casual, this would put Call of Duty on my list of casual games, but not Walking Dead, primarily because The Walking Dead can get incredibly emotionally taxing, and Call of Duty is just braindead action, no more intelligent than Angry Birds.

 

[synobal]

I feel like this confuses indie games with casual games. For instance I wouldn't really consider Super Meat Boy, The Walking Dead, Journey, Minecraft or Castle Crashers to be casual games. SMB in particular is renowned for being one of the hardest games in years. But that's just me.

QFT I came here to pretty much say this all together.

 

[Ed130 The Vanguard]

I feel like this confuses indie games with casual games. For instance I wouldn't really consider Super Meat Boy, The Walking Dead, Journey, Minecraft or Castle Crashers to be casual games. SMB in particular is renowned for being one of the hardest games in years. But that's just me.

I agree, many of the games strike me as indie fare rather than casual.

 

[chstens]

I feel like this confuses indie games with casual games. For instance I wouldn't really consider Super Meat Boy, The Walking Dead, Journey, Minecraft or Castle Crashers to be casual games. SMB in particular is renowned for being one of the hardest games in years. But that's just me.

If "casual" wasn't a term devoid of meaning already, this is the final nail in the coffin... then again, "indie" is going down the same path. I still don't get how Sony-published Journey qualifies as "indie", either.

Pretty much this. I would define any game you can very easily just pick up and play for a bit with little to no impact as casual, this would put Call of Duty on my list of casual games, but not Walking Dead, primarily because The Walking Dead can get incredibly emotionally taxing, and Call of Duty is just braindead action, no more intelligent than Angry Birds.

Wooooo, that's a ton of assumptions you made there, seemingly for the sake of making "casual" feel like a negative attribute. I'm also not sure of where in your definition Tetris, Lumines or other clever, deep but very approachable and accessible games would fall.

Like I said, I dislike the term "casual" altogether. I don't know what it's even supposed to mean, either as described in this infographic... or by you just now.

I had absolutely no intention of making "casual" seem like a negative term, I enjoy both Call of Duty and Angry Birds on occasion, either way, I agree it's a silly term, I never really use it outside of discussion about "casual games." One way or another, no games are either casual or hardcore. Now there's a term I dislike even more, "hardcore."

 

[fwiffo]

It seems like people enjoy good games, and zynga doesn't make them. Makes sense.

 

[T3hSource]

If this info graph is showing rise of the "social" and "indie" scenes and by that I mean every development house that isn't pumped millions of dollars to make th latest blockbuster then yes,it is quite decent.This is why 2012 seems much less dominated by AAA blockbusters to me compared to previous years.The rise of "middle class" games is something many people were waiting for.I personally avoid calling many games "indie",because they have the quality of a well made,well polished "middle class" game.An experience rivaling that of a AAA title,yet the budget is apparently nowhere near the same.

 

[Smertnik]

then again, "indie" is going down the same path. I still don't get how Sony-published Journey qualifies as "indie", either.

Well, as opposed to the whole casual/hardcore nonsense the term 'indie game' always had an exact definition, it's just that some people tend to use it the wrong way.