Wii Sports (2006), a collection of five simple sports games in which players used the game controller to swing a tennis racket or a baseball bat, was bundled with the Wii console in most territories and sold over 82 million copies as of 2019. Video game consoles' primary audience is hardcore gamers, but there are some casual games on every game console, and Nintendo's Wii console's unique motion-sensing controller appealed to a more casual audience that was perhaps intimidated by other consoles' gamepad input devices. These games innovated in viral marketing by rewarding players for sending invites to friends and posting game updates on their Facebook Wall.Ĭasual games became popular on smartphones immediately upon their debut, with touch-screen phones like the iPhone of 2007 featuring large color displays, all-day availability to the phone owner, and intuitive tapping-and-dragging user interfaces. Happy Farm inspired many clones, including the most popular social network game, FarmVille (2009), which peaked at 83.76 million monthly active users in March 2010. In 20, casual social network games rapidly attained mainstream popularity following the release of Mafia Wars for Facebook, and Happy Farm in China. As late as 2009, there was still a market for US$20 casual games purchased at retail or as a download. One of the most prominent casual games, Bejeweled, started out as a Flash game that could be downloaded for a fee, or purchased at retail. The advent of Shockwave and Flash created a boom in web-based games, encouraging designers to create simple games that could be hosted on many different websites and which could be played to completion in one short sitting. Some publishers and developers branded themselves specifically as casual game companies, like Big Fish Games, PopCap Games, and MumboJumbo. In the mid-2000s, more sites specialized in game hosting and publishing, such as Gamesville and RealNetworks. The company published four Microsoft Entertainment Packs for casual gaming on office computers from 1990 to 1992.Ĭasual games started to flourish online in the 1990s along with the rise of the World Wide Web, with card games and board games available from paid services like AOL and Prodigy, and then from web portals, like Yahoo! Games and Microsoft's Gaming Zone.
Subsequent versions of Windows included casual games Minesweeper, FreeCell, and Spider Solitaire.
Microsoft's Solitaire (1990), which came free with Microsoft Windows, is widely considered the first hit "casual game" on a computer, with more than 400 million people having played the game as of 2007.
It was quickly learned and immensely popular, and is credited with making Nintendo's fledgling portable gaming system a success. In 1989, Nintendo's Game Boy was released with Tetris as a free pack-in game.
Journalist Chris Kohler wrote in 2010 that Namco's arcade game Pac-Man (1980), which debuted during the golden age of video arcade games, may be the first casual video game, due to its "cute cast of characters and a design sensibility that appealed to wider audiences than the shoot-em-up Space Invaders." It is estimated to have been played more than ten billion times during the 20th century, making it the highest-grossing video game of all time. The term " hyper-casual game" or "instant game" arose in 2017 to describe extremely easy-to-learn games that require no download, being played in an existing app like a web browser or messaging app, and that usually monetize by showing advertisements to the player. Any game monetization method can be used, from retail distribution to free-to-play to ad-supported.
Simple user interface, operated with a mobile phone tap-and-swipe interface or a one-button mouse interface.Fun, simple gameplay that is easy to understand.