There are a gazillion articles on the net on how casual games are for everybody. But if you go to any major casual games portal, all the games featured there are mostly appealing for your mom.

Why is that? It's because your mom is the only person willing to pay full price for a PC Game. And that's the only business model that major casual games portals are supporting right now.

Either they change, or a new generation of portals will emerge. I feel that it's going to be a combination of both. Some of the existing players will survive, and some new ones will emerge.

What will be the key ingredients of the next generation of Casual Games portals?

Amazon/Netflix types of listings

The era of the top 10 for everybody is over. Pushing the same top 10 to everybody is one of the reasons for the current crisis in casual games PC downloads. Instead of diversifying and monetizing new audiences, the top 10 only serves the soccer moms who originally started buying Casual Games in the first place. Portals weren't forced to change as they have enjoyed pretty good growth over these years. But now they are reaching a limit if they don't expand to everybody else. Imagine what Walmart sales would be if they would have only stuff for your mom.

Socializing is fun

Facebook has taught the game industry a lot of things. Among them: a simple to reach, asynchronous, multi-player game can be played by millions of people. For years in the industry we have worked on lobbies, leaderboards, ladders, and dozens of features for gamers. But what people want? One button asynchronous bite-your-friend gaming.

Most portals don't allow developers or publishers to create connected games, because the game talks to the developers' and publishers' backend instead of the portal's, and the portal doesn't want to share their customers. No developer should break their community apart, as the water cooler effect will be broken. Portals need to change, as games will become increasingly connected.

Every game is unique, and its way of monetizing it is too

Have you seen many men buying $500 bags? However, Gucci is having a blast selling those to women. Jansport doesn't do bad, even when there are all those companies that manufacture bags so people can get them for free at conferences and events. A lot of people don't care if they get a big logo stamped on their free bag.

There are a lot of really great games out there which fail because they are tied to the wrong business model. The next generation of portals will support all kinds of monetization schemes. Those stuck in just try-and-buy will just miss opportunities. At the same time, the revenue share scenario needs to go both ways. If you have a connected game where items are for sale, the purchase of that item will happen at the game's (hence the developer's) backend. The thought of doing this freaks out the managers at the 1.0 portals. They'll need to change.

And what else?

I'm looking forward to the future. I'm sure we'll see games that will be monetized not just by one but by various business models. We need to tell the portals what we need. After all, if we don't make games for them, how are they going to make money?