4T2's Top 5 Future Trends in Casual Gaming

Thanks to everyone who attended my recent talk at the Technology World Event. I hope you enjoyed it.

As promised, here are my / 4T2s top five (publishable) Future Trends for Casual Games.

5 - No more “Visit facebook.com/MyBrand”

Hurray! This was getting really boring. A new wave of ‘super APIs’ have been created by companies such as Janrain and Gigya. These allow you to login to a website or game via any of your social network IDs. You can then pull details of your friends and other data from that network to send challenges, publish achievements and generally annoy your boss by playing games and browsing the web when you should be working.

Social networks will become a conduit for passing information, but no longer be the advertised destination. Why would a company want to push potential clients to an environment where competitors can actively market to them? It’s also getting very expensive to advertise games inside Facebook, so the opportunity to generate high volume, low cost traffic there has now gone.

This will make web games BIG, or even bigger anyway. If a Facebook game can generate millions of plays a day, imagine what a Facebook, Twitter, Linked In, YouTube, mySpace, Gmail, Yahoo!, Newgrounds, Kongregate (please integrate these last two!) enabled game can achieve.

4 - Co-operative gaming

This is the most predictable item in our chart, as much of this is happening already. Imagine your friend has kindly spent three weeks building up a super tank in Call of Duty 10. Why sit around with a pistol trying to do the same thing? Either borrow his tank (winning him additional upgrades), rent his tank (allowing him to buy more upgrades) or hire him to help you complete that final level (paying him to buy more upgrades). Both players benefit - everyone’s a winner.

This enables players to achieve one of the key motivations of gaming - showing off how good you are to your friends and peers.

3 – Design-a-gaming

All good games offer the player the ability to personalise the content to some degree, via level builders, avatars, equipment choice and naming privileges.

In the immediate future this will become much more prevalent, with the ability to build the fundamental rules of a sandboxed game yourself. Don’t like FPS? Make your version of our game a platformer instead. Brands will be releasing causal game creation tools with one or two examples built in, allowing users to create their own challenges for their friends. Publish once and get 100,000 games promoting your brand.

Just as importantly, the example game you play will be pre-personalised to your taste. Social networks and blogs will help enable this by scanning your profile to pre-create content that suits your interests.

2 - Throw away your controllers

No one wants to sit down with a mouse and keyboard any more. Look at what virtually every major console manufacturer is currently doing.

Therefore toy companies will without question do the same. Your new Hot Wheels car will be the control device for Mario Carts 6. Want more virtual grip? Change the tyres on your physical toy and presto. This will lead into natural advertising opportunities for consumer goods brands that can give away the optional extras as an incentive to purchase the real product. For example, buy four real Pirelli tyres and get the toy wheels for your son or daughter’s game for free. Want additional fuel for your virtual car? Fill up at a real Exxon forecourt.

Toy based computer gaming, by simplifying the controller and moving it away from a traditional game input device, will also help bring a wider audience to the titles, in the same way the Nintendo Wii introduced the concept of playing games as a family unit.

We foresee any digitally connected device controlling games, from cameras to sat navs.

Note – We are not saying all games here, just a significantly higher percentage.

1 - All games will be free to play

Micro payments, control devices and in game advertising / sponsorship will become so fundamental to the economics of gaming that the majority of content (including console material) will initially be distributed for free. This is the natural extension of try before you buy. Try before you buy, but when you do buy, you are purchasing fully personalised content, tailored to what you want in that game.

Add in cloud based gaming, where you’ll be able to play any game, on any device, at a time that suits you, without having to trudge down to the shops and this argument becomes very persuasive. Companies will be virtually renting out their games for free to hook the public on their titles and then charging to access content like the multiplayer online arenas where the fun really lies.

This obviously has huge impact for high street retailers who are already taking great steps in offering a unique product if you physically purchase a game at their store.

The huge opportunity here is to figure out how a child’s parents will know that they want to purchase a triple bladed, magic enabled sword of doom for Christmas, and offer a simple way of purchasing it. Game or console branded pre paid “credit cards” could become very popular as you’ll still want to hand over something physical. See all of the other entries in this chart for other ideas.