Playyoo Archive

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.

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.