Singstar senior producer, Paulina Bozek was hired by Atari, to head a new online games studio up in London. According to this article, Atari is looking at “innovating and developing mass-market consumer games and services for online-enabled devices including personal computers and game consoles”.

I wonder what it feels like to have your company’s Q1 sales amounting to $86M? A growth of 33% compared to the previous year, according to this site. And this was courtesy of titles such as Imagine Babyz (DS), the Petz and MyCoach series which was released under Ubisoft’s Games for Everyone casual gaming brand.
The company intents to release more casual titles for the DS and Wii in the next quarter.

For the guys down at Nintendo, the E3 was a big opportunity to introduce all their new and upcoming offerings. And guess what? All of them concerns casual gaming, aimed for a wider audience.

So you want to put up your own online gaming business, eh? This article from the InformativePost.com can give you an idea on how to do it. It may not be 100% accurate since there’s no proven formula for making a site boom, but then again, you might as well have to start somewhere, right? Here’s the 5 points you have to take into consideration, in summary:

Controversial online ad company, Zango, just recently lost 70 employees – 68 of which are from layoffs while 2 execs tendered their resignation. This happened a month after Washington CEO magazine announced them as one of the best companies to work for in the state. Sad news.

After the study that developer Pop Cap Games did previously on how casual gaming beats stress, comes another study about the benefits of gaming for the disabled.
According to a survey done in the U.S., one of five players of casual games are disabled, whether it be a mental, physical or development disability. Information Solutions Group, who did the survey for Pop Cap, said that out of 13,296 respondents, 2,728 claims to have some form of disability. That’s more the declared 15.1% disabled according to U.S. Census data.

This post that I’ve stumbled upon may be old, but it’s too funny not to mention. The author was just puzzled as to why casual gamers don’t seem to mind if the title they’re playing had a bad review. Apparently, a lot of casual gamers don’t read reviews. Eek!
Kathy Vrabeck, President of Casual Games down at EA said that reviews are important to core gamers and this doesn’t necessarily apply to casual gamers. What more, she, herself doesn’t really care much about reviews.

Now here’s one article that’s right up my alley. *grin*
PopCap recently published a press release showing that banning internet personal use can actually cost around $7.5 billion in business money. Gasp! It also states that casual gaming in the workplace has a positive effect on the work environment.
How do you say?

Developer, The Game Factory, just released DS Zenses, the first in the line of casual games they are going to release this year.  And guess who’s their target?  The fairer sex.   Particularly the 25-34 year old ones who has the spending power.
This article from MCV UK stated that 74% of paying casual gamers are, gasp, women! (Hmm, then why am I not surprised?) And that’s according to the Casual Games Association.  Game Factory’s European marketing manager, Lucinda Digweed also believes that the “male-dominated core gaming is already saturated” that’s why they’re giving more importance in catering to the other types …read more

I  just received a newsletter a few days ago from BigFish Games.  They’re selling a hidden object title for under a dollar with an original $19.99 tag price!  Unbelievable?  Better believe it.  Head off to BigFish Games now and avail of this special limited time offer.  Hurry, offer expires May 29!
Image taken from BigFishGames.com