casual games Archive

Fyrebug offers you a simple way to create a customized flash game with your own photos and music. I found the process of creating a game simple and easy.  Ads are served after each game has completed and the ads are served by MochiAds. Since you will want to play more than once, you will watch the ad.

The game creator is a flash application which walks you through the steps to create the customized game. Fyrebug offers about 40 games that can be customized. For some reason, the boxing game appears to be the most popular game to customize. Games can be shared and embedded. I’ve embedded a sample game below. 

The Fyrebug customized game gallery shows about 100 games that have been created. The games are on the very basic side and probably won’t appeal to high-end gamers. But if you want to beat up your favorite blogger, Fyrebug works perfectly.

Jon at IndieStartups spoke with the Fyrebug founders regarding how he came up with the idea. Co-founder Jonathan Widro said, "My partner and I were working at 4kids Entertainment, and worked closely with flash games. We came up with the idea for Fyrebug, but kids cant upload their own images, so we decided to pursue the idea on our own."

Click here to make your own Fyrebug game

Social networking game provider Zynga is announcing today that they are opening their network to third-party developers and publishers. Zynga claims to be the largest social game network with 1.3 million daily active users and 20 million registered users. (it’s nice to see a company share active numbers)

Current publishers include: Facebook, Bebo, Friendster, meebo and soon MySpace will be added. The initial third-party games announced includes Sierra Online’s web games Capital Defense and Boogie Bunnies and Come2Play’s Backgammon and Bigpoint’s two most popular games Dark Orbit and Sea Fight.

While not mentioned in the press release, apparently other large social networks could become publishers for Zynga as well.

So here’s how this works… if you are a casual game developer trying to market your game on Facebook, you could either do it yourself or sign on with Zynga and let them promote the game for you. If you promote it yourself, any income you generate is your own. With the Zynga deal, you share in the revenue generated by your games but you have a higher probability of making your game sticky as Zynga will be promoting it.

The company has raised $10 million from a variety of companies including NY-based Union Square Ventures. The company is in heavy hire mode.

While I still believe 2008 is the year of the widget, casual gaming is right up there too.

If you’ve been waiting for a chance to play Weewar, they have just announced it’s no longer in private beta. It’s a "social casual game" meaning that you play with others. Think Risk plus Twitter plus IRC plus SimCity.

There’s also an API for you developer-types along with a variety of 3rd party services to make sure you know what’s going on in the game at all times. 

NOTE: This is a massive time suck – so do not click the link unless you have 1-2 hours to kill :)

Here is an example map:

Casual gaming is hot, has been hot and will continue to be hot — and it’s easy to realize why outside of the "fun factor" – because women are the most popular casual gamers and they click ads. Will mobile casual games become a significant percentage of overall casual gaming as more people move to devices that can handle more than simple Tetris?

Playyoo wants to own the mobile casual games market and is opening their gaming aggregator to the public. So far the company reports mobile users in 82 countries on 162 mobile networks since their preview release last October.

To get developers excited about developing on Adobe Flash Lite, Playyoo is sponsoring the Playyoo Game Contest, which offers $25,000 USD in cash prizes for the best mobile casual game built on Flash Lite.

The game stream on Playyoo offers recommendations based on your profile and your friend’s. The site itself could use some polish – looks a bit loose around the ends in terms of design and usability. While I thought the company was located in London, several of their job openings are listed in Switzerland. I’d suggest they add some company and contact information and get rid of the "coming soon" pages.

Other popular casual gaming sites include AddictingGames (which drove over 1 million plays to a game I created about six years ago) and newcomers Kongregate and CasualGems which uses digg-like voting to determine which games should appear on the home page.

We’ve written about Meebo a bunch of times before including an interview with CEO Seth Sternberg. When Meebo launched their platform, I joked. Today, it’s me who has egg on the face. Mike and Kristen have the news about the first use of the platform — this time it’s games; casual games in fact. I’ve learned in a former life that casual games are one of the best (if not the best) ways to engage customers. For Meebo it increases the engagement time which allows for more marketing time. RadiusIM spoke last night about the engagement time and how high it is for IM services, gaming just raises it one more notch.

Check out this list of available games: AddictingGames’ Fratboy Unicycle Relay, Animal Puzzle, Artillery, Attack, Backgammon, Battle Pool, Blackjack, Checkers, Chess, Connect4, Go, Kongregate Racing, Match4, Music Man, Picture This!, Pirate War, Platform Racing, Reversi, Sheep Me, Sploder, Sudoku Wars, Tactics 100, Texas Hold ‘em, and World Travel Puzzle.

This comes on the heels of the Meebo announcement as the selected chat partner for Joost.

Perhaps we could create a holiday web tech blogger gaming battle royal with proceeds to charity. While I might not be on top of the TechMeme leaderboard, no one can take down my combo button action!

I’ve been playing with a new casual game site this morning, Kickplay. Kickplay has a variety of casual games to play but what’s very cool is that you can swap the images and sounds in the game to personalize the game. I’ve embedded a very basic solitaire game using the CN logo below. The games are simple but addicting. Now I am considering creating a shoot your favorite blogger game.

If you want to keep your brand in front of your target customer, my research in a previous life said gaming was the best way. Casual games are played for hours at a time, and each time they flip a card in this example, they see my logo.

Kickplay let’s you embed your customized game on MySpace, Facebook, and quick post buttons to blogs. "The Kickplay service intersects with two of the largest and fastest growing segments of the internet: 200 million on-line gamers and the rapid growing number of people craving to personalize themselves on the Web," said Kendall Kunz, founder and CEO of Kickplay, Inc.

Here is the solitaire game I customized in about 3 minutes:

London-based Playyoo is launching a game contest today to mobile casual game developers using the Adobe Flash Lite technology. Looks like the total prize pool is over $20,000. The site launches in preview mode today at 14:00 European time and will feature some game trials and information on the contest.

Casual gaming is hot and while I don’t know if mobile casual gaming is hot, I can only imagine it will grow as the handhelds grow in their ability to play games. In my former life we built loads of casual games that received millions of plays a day from moms. It’s just amazing how large a segment casual gaming is. 

“The enormous success of user-generated content and social networking sites reflects the universal needs of self-expression and identifying with others. Playyoo will provide a social platform for user-generated mobile casual games — enabling both professionals and novices to express themselves through their games on a global scale. And Playyoo will introduce the fun world of mobile games to a whole new group of mobile users worldwide,” said Chris Pelly, CEO of Playyoo.