GDN: Do you plan on games that are in-between?

O’Neill - Absolutely. You mean like Plants vs. Zombies? That’s where a lot of our ideas are coming from. Coming up with new ideas that really serve both casual and traditional hardcore such as Braid or even Peggle.

 GDN: What sort of focus do you believe larger companies should have on the casual market?

O’Neill - A truly casual market, if you’re looking at sites like Big Fish, it’s a very different market-place and the consumer is not looking to buy a game with 40 hours of gameplay. They pick up a game, play it for ten to thirty minutes and walk away happy. If you want to bring in massive budgets you can, but it’s more the design that works.

 Cole – The bigger the budget, the more averse they get. Two games on the show floor (Bayonetta and Dante’s Inferno) have similar mechanics. They both even have big bosses holding onto a ledge trying not to fall off, and to kill them you have to strike at the hand. Anything with a big cross-over of casual and hardcore must be lower budget due to risk.

 GDN: Any bigger games you think are doing a good job of breaching the markets?

O’Neill - Return to Ravenhurst, published last year. Kind of like Myst, adventure style, extremely popular with casuals and larger budget. It’s already online on PC/CD, but it probably won’t make the jump to console.

 Cole – It would really suffer on console.

O’Neill – The DS seems a great market to extend into casual, but there aren’t many that will make the jump to Xbox Live Arcade or PSN. You’ll see the PopCap style ideas that appeal to everyone, but in that old 80’s arcade style. When all you had to invest was a quarter and next thing you know you’re dead in three minutes.

 Cole – Even then it’s like “why did I spend a quarter?”

 GDN: Do you think there’s going to be a time when casual gamers are willing to invest a couple hours time into a game as they might into a film?

Cole – I doubt it. Most of them are housewives that got kids down to their nap, but when the kids wake up they need to be able to get up and walk away and return a day later.

 O’Neill – Not missing a beat is key. Ability to pick it up at any point and keep playing. One of the things stressed often in casual is always rewarding the player. Even if they do poorly they should get rewards.

 You can check out the Spark Plug Games website at www.sparkpluggames.com. For more information on 2BeeGames and their co-development on the game Storm you can check www.2beegames.com.