Deus Ex creator is going casual...

http://www.casualgaming.biz/news/27809/Warren-Spector-switches-allegiance-to-casual

interesting...certainly the casual market is huge but it's rapidly filling up with "the big boys".

I think casual will re-define itself.

good casual = amiga like games, interesting game concepts
bad casual = moving from boring big games to boring smaller games, the same small games concepts over and over again

It's likely that we'll see a lot more of the second option.

We HAVE been seeing a lot more of the second option. How many clones of each small game are there? Must be a billion match 4 types (no offense meant to those here that produce them), and even with the legal action taken against them the boxoid (vector wars?, geometry wars?) games are still being produced as well. Same goes for every successful small game I can think of.

Hujiklo's suggestion and the 'bad casual' is already happenning. Slowly people will tire of the same of shite and move to something more interesting... which will be something done by a small team that used to be something big publishers did all the time.

Which makes devs like Tachyon the new kings of hardcore. ;O)

Good. It's about time "the big boys" started thinking like businessmen, if the collective industry is supposed to survive.

The thing is corporations do not go where the ideas are, they follow the money. If they are leaning towards casual games it's because it is selling. The more money they make in a casual field the more they will try to squeeze out of it - so it is inevitable that they will 'ruin' the casual game scene the way they are squeezing all juice out of their current markets. Same games, better gfx. Eventually people will wizen up and get tired of the rubbish and move on to other things. And thus history will repeat itself ad nauseum.

Yeah that's probably true.

Very true.

Sure. But "casual" games is a different market altogether. The reason casual games are so (relatively) successful is for the same reason the AAA 6-months-or-newer-hardware PC games market is failing miserably. That more people are realizing that smaller teams can make just as much money making simple yet enjoyable 2D color matching games, as they can making boring repetitive formulaic FPS and at a fraction of the cost, is great news (for the consumer, although not so much for the aspiring developer)!

I am not following this.

This is surely contractural, therefore it is to be expected. It is like announcing you are going to sell cold ice cream.