Casual Fortunes: Getting Rich Slowly With Casual Games

Written by Daniel Lurie | Wednesday, August 31, 2005

“Which American designer personally made the most money last year from computer games he or she designed? Not the most money for a company, mind you, nor for a studio or licensor, but individual, take-home, taxable income. Was it a famous game god? John Carmack, Will Wright, Sid Meier, Warren Spector? Probably not. It was probably some guy you never heard of who wrote some little shareware game you never heard of. Those “casual games”—the puzzles and Mahjongg tilesets and card games and Breakout clones and match-three Bejeweled-type things—are downloaded, and sell, in numbers some game gods only dream about. Over the lengthy life of a successful casual game, the independent (“indie”) designer can make serious, serious money – high six-figures and low sevens.” Visit the link below to learn more about this interesting business topic.

Related Links: The Escapist


Reader Comments


Najdorf wrote on Sep 2nd at 04:15PM
Duh. It's pretty obvious to me that small games are a better business model than big games. This is because

1)You ultimately get more exposure with many small games than a big one

2)Code has decreasing returns to scale: if a 100 lines pong is 'x' fun, a 10000 lines game is rarely '100x" fun.
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