Had a wide ranging conversation with a very smart friend this morning about FarmVille, speaking at conferences, and different leadership styles.

During the conversation, he shared how early game developers used to complain that mistakes by retailers ruined the opportunities for their games to become hits.

Because of FarmVille and my experience making hit PC games for Westwood/EA, an instant set of connections flashed through my mind.

“Selling games at retail is like a glacially slow version of selling games on the internet.”

The thought process unrolled:

1. Selling at retail is a glacially slow versus using the internet.

2. The slowness and “physical-ness” of selling at retail creates it’s own set of problems (shelf space, inventory, cost of goods).

3. Debugging the problems with your product at retail are exacerbated by the problems created by selling at retail. (Do players not like the game or did the retailer forget to put it on the shelf?).

Now about selling social games online.

1. “Instant on”: player sees and clicks a link to your game on Facebook and starts playing instantly with no obligations.

2. If the player likes your game, they keep playing. If not, they quit playing. We know how  as game makers how many people are playing the game each day.

3. Without looking at any personal information, we can know when people stop playing the game and can make daily adjustment to add fun, remove boring parts and fix bugs.

4. When a player spends money in your game, it shows up in your bank account that day.

Seems obvious to me. Hope other people see it too:

Don’t waste another minute selling games at retail.

Seriously…stop it. Right now.

Do you see it too or am I off track?

And immediately dominates by selling 250k units in the first week.

Apparently it also sold more units than the next 9 top selling titles put together (more in this article from GamesIndustry.biz).

The next bit of interesting data from the same charts is how many of the top 10 titles were on each platform.

The tally:

6 of the top 10 selling games were on the DS

2 of the top 10 selling games were on the Wii

1 of the top 10 selling games was on the 360

1 of the top 10 selling games was on the PS2

Another sign of the strength of hand helds for sure. I love it when companies know their stuff and just execute no matter what the conventional industry thinking is. Go Nintendo!

Beyond the interest from players, could it be that casual games offer something game developers have been looking for as well?

When I talk about it with other developers, I get a range of reactions…from waxing nostalgic about “bygone days of creating games that are simple fun” to a “disdain for anything that doesn’t push the latest platform to it’s limits”.

More and more though, it seems that both developers and publishers are starting to acknowledge the reality of casual game market, not just as a solution for the never ending quest to increase revenues, but as an unserved market with a rapidly growing interest from both producers and consumers.

Of course some developers just want to create games that are fun to make as well as play…

EA’s current thinking on casual games, courtesy of “GameIndustry.biz”: http://www.gamesindustry.biz/content_page.php?aid=28124.