Consolidation begins in Casual Games Sector: MTV acquires Atom
It's been interesting watching the growth of casual games, and the pointing to that growth (and extensions such as Yahoo Games, Live Arcade, and others) as being the potential savior of a gaming industry struggling with rising costs of development and a deficit of creativity. While I'm a big fan of casual gaming, I don't think the cost of creating these games is going to stay low for long. There's already intense competition in the space, and just as we saw 10-15 years ago, the smaller players are beginning to be bought up by the bigger. Pogo was bought long ago by EA, and according to this Next Generation post, MTV just bought Atom for $200 M. To quote the article:
"The deal puts the popular casual gaming site Shockwave.com under the MTV umbrella, along with AddictingGames.com. Two film and video outlets are also included in the deal, in the form of AtomFilms.com and AddictingClips.com."
You can imagine other larger publishers are going to be looking to acquire similar studios. I can see companies such as BigFish, Popcap, and maybe even Real Networks (for Real Arcade) being snatched up in the coming year or two. The good news is that the funding and quality of games will be going up; the bad news is that as game budgets go up, it'll be more difficult for smaller guys to use casual gaming as a way to enter the industry and we may not see as many original concepts.
I do think there are ways to help address that (more on that later), but no matter how you spin it, the halcyon days of casual game development as a "new and infinite" frontier seem to be at an end. Doesn't mean we won't see great games and continue to enjoy them, but it's going to be tougher to be an independent and compete.