Topic summary
Casual games
Extracted from the Wikipedia article Casual game.
History
Casual games started to flourish online in the 1990s along with the rise of the World Wide Web, with card games and board games available from paid services like AOL and Prodigy, and then from web portals, like Yahoo! Games and Microsoft's Gaming Zone. In the mid-2000s, more sites specialized in game hosting and publishing, such as Gamesville and RealNetworks. Some publishers and developers branded themselves specifically as casual game companies, like Big Fish Games, PopCap Games, and MumboJumbo. The advent of Shockwave and Flash created a boom in web-based games, encouraging designers to create simple games that could be hosted on many different websites and which could be played to completion in one short sitting. One of the most prominent casual games, Bejeweled, started out as a Flash game that could be downloaded for a fee, or purchased at retail. As late as 2009, there was still a market for US$20 casual games purchased at retail or as a download.