Having spent my career developing for almost every type of game hardware and nearly every type of game, both in the production trenches and on the management level, I would go as far as suggesting that casual game development may be the place to be, if, above all else, you really wish to make games that stick to their core goals and original design like glue. Mainstream, high-investment game development (in dollars spent and man hours worked) regularly involves creating large, saturated worlds (both single-player and multi-player), vehicles, characters, props, AI, networking, LAN lobbies, chat features, and multi-faceted graphic user interfaces, with many other unique moving parts across multiple development disciplines, during one project.

Casual games (which are also mainstream but under a different context) tighten the belt on almost every one of these elements, enforcing manageability out of necessity, and realistically acknowledging what is needed, first, versus what is wanted, second. In the general games industry, where there continues to be a global struggle to enforce better management and manageability of game products, the casual games sector has become a beacon of business practice hope.

The 800-pound gorilla of the games industry, commonly known as the entertainment software sector, could learn quite a bit from casual games development, in the vein of proper short- and long-term resource management. The managers in charge of 70-100+ person teams that are developing the latest FPS or MMO, regardless of platform, would take a more refined approach to those projects if they began their careers in a smaller capacity.

Furthermore, for me and other by-the-book game developers, I have never forgotten that video games, no matter the genre or type, were derived from board games, and, in turn, toys. A true test of a good game design is, of course, a paper version of that design, which, again, is a traditional extension of board games, and, in turn, casual games. It is amazing that no matter how hard the games industry (particularly the entertainment software sector) attempts to separate itself from its roots as board games and toys, the worm, as it were, turns game development right back to those same roots.

Casual game development is very much a revival-of-sorts, generating yet another form of dozens, even hundreds of historically-traditional games (from checkers to black jack to horse shoes). Casual games, as they are known today, are on course as a permanent reminder of from where all video games originally hail, and I expect casual games, through the collective efforts of companies like Zynga, Playfish, and Kongregate, to become a transcendent sector of the games industry for years to come. When all else fails, when stunning visuals with poor gameplay are no longer acceptable, and when the latest powerhouse game consoles are typically exposed as nothing without quality games, there will be casual games, quietly and innocently leading the way.