Despite setbacks by behemoths like Zynga, casual games are still going strong.
Rebel Entertainment, which broke onto the scene with the playfully casual action-RPG, Dungeon Rampage, has created a handy infographic detailing the goings on in the casual games industry in 2012, broken down by month. Leading with Super Meat Boy selling more than 1 million copies at the beginning of January, the infographic focuses on some of the huge numbers in the casual games space.
January was a good month for casual gaming, with Temple Run seeing 20 million downloads, and the Casual Games Association predicting the social game market to hit $8.64 billion in 2014, which is a sizeable chunk of the $60-something billion dollar videogame industry as a whole. Then in February, it states that a Parks Associates study showed that the US gaming population had nearly tripled since 2008 though no specific numbers were provided, while Zynga was teaming up with Hasbro to make board games out of videogames based on other board games.
Early in May Angry Birds apparently hit 1 billion downloads, which translates to a lot of birds being slingshotted at even more pigs. Later on in July, Ouya’s Kickstarter raised a cool $3 million in just two days in a bid to bring casual gaming to your living room. Finally, rounding out the year in November, Rebel Entertainment’s own Dungeon Rampage surpassed 5 million registered users.
So, perhaps the whole infographic is just a nifty way of telling us that Dungeon Rampage has 5 million registered users, but if more companies would put together awesome infographics like this to share these updates, I expect we’d all be a bit better informed and quite entertained.
