One of the great benefits, as a casual gamer, is the knowledge that your games were developed by a small group with complete focus on the goal. This isn’t always true with a bigger production where marketing helps drive the game to its final stages of development.

A recent example of this being Shadowrun on Microsoft Vista and the Xbox 360. The product has a great vision and huge potential. Reviewers found it mediocre at best while a few gamers tend to love the multi-player aspects. Why? The game has its flaws, like most big projects, but one of the bigger issues in this example is cost and platform.

Shadowrun was released as a “Vista only” title for the PC with a simultaneous, albeit costly, release on the Xbox 360. Gamers wonder why they have to pay full price (USD $59.99) for a game with so few available levels and play modes in a multi-player only game.

Why?

Because marketing dictated it as such! As stated in an interview on PC Gamer podcast, one of the folks at FASA Interactive said he really didn’t have say in the price but that he suggested a lower one given the feature set. Why didn’t they listen to one of the folks that brought this great title to the gamers? Because Microsoft rarely listens to such requests when they know they can get full price…. or can they?

The result of this move has been players saying “it’s not worth the price” or “I’ll wait until the price drops” or even worse “Circuit City is giving it away free with Halo 2 Vista.” When your retailers begin to drop the price less than 3-months after release you should consider your mistakes real.

This is a PR nightmare we rarely see for a casual title. Gamers know what they’re getting for the money and the money is typically reasonable. Very few publishers attempt to offer steep prices for a casual title, even on the Nintendo Wii we’re finding reasonable prices considering the platform.

A casual title tends to have a smaller team, a tiny marketing group (if any) and a more intimate feeling. A smaller website can go to one of these developers and ask for demonstrations of their titles, “freebies” and advanced copies with a high success rate. Is it because they’re desperate for customers?

No.

They know what they have, they know it’s a success and they pay attention to their customers. I’ve never found a casual game company that didn’t offer up a free game title to perform a full review. Sure, it’s free advertising but you’re handing over a potential revenue title to a group of gamers that are familiar with the casual gaming territory. We are going to be critical on many key points: fun, replay value and features. Yet we still get advanced copies because developers know when they’ve got a hit.

It is not a huge movie production with too many chefs in the kitchen. Your team is all driving to the same focused goal and everyones input counts. You won’t end up with many teams where input is simply ignored in preference to good marketing and PR. Casual developers are casual players too, they know what’s good and what’s crap.

Crap is paying too much for a game that doesn’t hold the value of its cost. Crap is putting out a title for a single PC operating system in order to push your Vista sales when your game doesn’t take advantage of the new libraries (such as DirectX 10).

Is this the developers fault? No, it’s the fault of “the machine,” the large group of people working on your project with alternative motivations and secondary objectives. The only objective should be to make a fun video game that players will enjoy and feel they received their moneys worth.

Listen to the developers, keep your goal straight and don’t force consumers to upgrade platforms in order to play.