At the Casual Games conference at GDC 06, one of the audience stood up and asked the panel of Serious Games or Casual Games industry experts whether they thought that Brain Training was going to do similar numbers in the US as it had done in Japan, and how that might change the face of casual gaming.
The response from the panel was almost literally: “What? Never heard of it”, leading to shock and awe on the part of the questioner, and a collective shrug of “who cares?” from the panel. I was very surprised, but also highly amused at the ignorance of the US casual games people on the panel, and expected that sooner or later they’d get their comeuppance for not paying any attention to worldwide big trends like BT.
I noticed in this year’s roundup of Dev studios by Develop that Brain Training did approx $45 million revenue this past year in the UK *alone*, and the sequel added a further $30 million or so. In the UK. In the last 12 months. Alone. Yeah, think about that.
Maybe I should dig out the list of panels at GDC 06 and try to remember which panelists it was, and drop them a friendly email with the original question re-asked :) ? It would be cruel, perhaps – but if you’re going to organize a panel on the future of casual games and invite questions, then perhaps you’ve kind of committed to offering the audience some level of knowledge on what’s going on :).
NB: I’ve never sat on any “future of…” panel, and don’t intend to. As one of my esteemed colleagues puts it: if you have any confidence in your prediction, why are you telling all your competitors? (one obvious answer is, of course: because you’re going to start a company and you’re fishing for investors and partners – but that’s pretty narrow :))
One reply on “Dr. Kawashima who?”
Meanwhile, that same year I gave my first ever GDC lecture, on the state of brain training games.