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Rounding up my report from the 2nd Casual Games Association Conference in Seattle, I had a chance to talk to many companies — I can't just say "developers" in the casual space, they all develop, publish and distribute — some with formal appointments, some as I passed their booths and found them available. My purpose was simple. Begin a conversation, talk to them about their company, their games, their direction and opinion about the casual games market. My, what a great time I had.

Vice President of Product Development Mike Suarez and Vice President of Sales Brian Garrison are two fun guys to hang out with, and laughter punctuated our chat often as I delved into their minds to discover what they thought of the casual games space. They traded off comments and quips so quickly, I made notes but ended up unable to attribute the quotes. MumboJumbo is a developer, publisher and distributor of casual games (aren't they all?), and they launch their games online first through all the major portals before bringing them to the retail space. What platforms? I asked.

"Every platform that users enjoy!" they said.

"There are a lot of partnerships in the casual games industry," said the people from MumboJumbo, adding that their company owned their IPs — apart from the licensed products — and were delighting in getting it more "right" each day. MumboJumob's biggest and most successful franchise to date is the Luxor franchise, and soon, they will be launching The Office, adapted from the hit TV show.

"The layout of an office — the cubicles — is very much like tables at a restaurant," according to MumboJumbo, alluding to the popular Diner Dash game. "The Office casual game will be based on task-management mechanics. Just like the TV show, the characters will play pranks on each other."

The player character will be Jim, and you are pitted against others The Office characters, who will try to prevent you from completing your tasks.

"They will grab your copying. ... Michael will get in your way," Mike and Brian said.

Spill your coffee? I asked eliciting laughter as they tried not to give too much away. The game will feature all the stars from the show in cartoon likeness, as well as digital sound clips of the actors.

"NBC has been great. They are allowing us to make the game fun first, before anything else," they said.

Why aren't there more casual games on the PSP or DS platforms, I asked.

"The console market is still very new," they said. "It's a perception problem. The console platform is viewed as a hardcore platform."

The approval process for Nintendo or the Sony PSP is horridly long, And "they are very proprietary in what they allow." Only the top five games will make it to the console platform. I understand, since it is just not financially feasible to bring other less popular games there.

Just what is the casual games demographic?

"Both genders, from children to grandmothers," Mike and Brian said.

So, not just the 35-plus female demographic?

"No. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy," Brian said.

MumboJumbo uses focus professionals, as well as "Kleenex" tests — where the employees bring friends into the studio — to evaluate the company's games. The company also draws from the pool of its registered customers to beta test products.

Do they think that the casual games market is at the tipping point as Peter Moore of Microsoft suggested?

"The growth is still exponential. Perhaps close to the tipping point," according to MumboJumbo.

What about the Microsoft involvement in the casual games market?

"It's all good news, and they are making it possible for gamers all around the world to play casual games," Mike said. "We're now looking not only at millions of potential players, we're looking at the tens and hundreds of millions of potential players!"

Craig Bocks, director of publishing at Playfirst, is a quiet, introspective man but no less interesting and informative. Playfirst's big hits in the casual games space are Diner Dash and Chocolatier. Both are resource-management games that require a bit of strategy. The next game on the horizon is Wedding Dash, the life of a wedding planner.

"We're bringing Quinn, Flo's roomie, to the fore," Craig said.

A little more involved, a little more complicated, with additional appeal in the pre-planning stage, he said. We will follow Quinn's progress from a simple backyard wedding to a huge wedding-of-the-stars-type bash. Tasks will include everything that a wedding planner does, from ordering flowers to cake, to making sure feuding family members aren't seated on the same table.

"Beta went extremely well, and this is our most anticipated launch this year," Craig said.

Wedding Dash will be available at the end of July.

Why is there so much collaboration in the casual games space, I asked.

"It's nice," Craig smiled. "It's the newness. The informal setting. The casual games market is doubling in size every two years, and I think that in the early days, we needed each other to survive."

Craig talked a little about Playfirst. It was incorporated in April 2004 with John Welch (from Shockwave) and Brad Eleman as the chief technical officer. A CTO? So, they were funded?

"Yes," he responded. "From the beginning. We do internal and external development and publishing, with about 25 percent of our games being developed in house."

Playfirst makes its Playground software development kit available to developers and seeks submissions of game ideas. What does the company look for in a game?

"Innovation," Craid said. "Strong themes and metaphors, a focus on character, story and narrative."

How many submissions do they get a month?

"Oh, about 10 to 20 a week," he said.

Oberon was formed in 2002 to create distribution platforms.

"It powers Pogo.com and MSNgames to name a couple. We have 150 to 175 partners who use it," said Tony Leamer, Oberon's brand director.

With the announcement of the company's intent to acquire PixelPlay, Oberon is in the forefront to be the first company to provide casual games across the interactive TV, online and mobile platforms.

"We acquired iPlay [mobile], and today's announcement solidifies our 'triple play' strategy of getting more games to more people on more platforms," Tony said.

Oberon also takes games to retail shelves with a partnership with Elephant Entertainment, and it provides retailers with digital interaction and a link back to the retailer. I asked for an explanation. It's like this: During installation, or perhaps with another icon, the consumer is offered additional downloads.

"There's a really nice uptake of people going back to the retailer," Tony said. "Say you buy the game from Wal-mart or Target or BestBuy. If you click the link, you are offered a free download or a coupon to the store to buy more games."

What are Oberon's most successful games?

"The Dream Day series," Tony said.

It's a hidden-object game and focused solely on the female audience.

"It's a romance game where you choose a story piece and build the story," he said.

Another popular game is its Magic Match series — a variant of the match-three mechanic with a likeable character, Giggles the Imp, who will be featured prominently in the next game of the series. Oberon also has exclusive rights to the Agatha Christie books and will develop games based on the story of each novel.

With as much as it has offered, the company also offered it a la carte. A developer seeking help from Oberon could use it from cradle to grave, or merely pick the service in which the developer was interested — getting to retail, and perhaps the distribution platform, or just assistance with the mobile platform.

"Your contracts must get interesting," I said.

"Well, those are a la carte, too!" Tony said.

As with other companies in this space, Oberon is a publisher. What does it look for?

"High-quality production values, a strong vision with respect to the game and to business," he said, explaining that someone with a good idea but lackadaisical attitude to business would not make the cut. "We also look for some sense of innovation and appropriate content."

What do you mean by appropriate content?

"We have a predominantly female and family audience, so we are looking for family-friendly content, as well as interesting concepts," Tony said, giving me two examples of interesting concepts.

Cradle of Rome was one.

"A simple match-three component coupled with a sim-light building component," he said.

Puzzle Quest was the other.

"Puzzles with an RPG twist. It's incredibly addictive," Tony laughed. "I thought it was an incredibly stupid idea. Instead, it became an incredibly successful game."

So ... how many women are in your acquisitions team?

"We need more women in the industry!" he said.

Oberon uses two teams in its evaluation of game submissions.

"We're 25 percent female! Really!" Tony said.

In its developer partnership managers and Tony's marketing team, he has one woman in his team of four.

"I'm so glad I have Nancy on my team," Tony confessed. "We look at a game that we think will appeal to women, and she goes ... 'are you crazy?' "

What is the casual games space like? Is it dog eat dog? I asked jokingly.

"I really enjoy the camaraderie that's found in this industry," he said. "Other companies are your competitors but also your friends."

Going forward, it is Tony's opinion that community in casual games will be a big deal.

"Up until now, playing casual games is a solitary experience, but connecting individuals and the industry will be key," he said.

To whit, Oberon is creating a platform to allow partners to build communities.

"Not just forums. Avatars, badges, user-created content, high-score status. All that is important," Tony said.

David Laprad, head of U.S. operations for Alawar, was happy to chat about the gaming industry and game journalism, since he wrote for Gamerzone. (But hey, you don't want to hear about our pet peeves.)

So, tell me about Alawar, I said.

"Well, it was started by a bunch of Russian kids who were all going to the same school in Siberia," David said.

Siberia! Well, not much else to do, eh? I joked.

"Not just any school, one of the top three in Siberia," quipped Valentin Merzlikin, who attended The Novasibirsk or New Siberia State University. "We studied different things. Some of us were in engineering, one was studying to be an economist, and one in mathematics, I think."

So how did a bunch of college kids from Russia end up publishing casual games in the U.S. market? Remember when casual games were really shareware games? You downloaded a demo, if you liked it; you sent a few bucks and got a floppy disk with the game and more levels? That was how it all started. Money. They were saturating the Russian market too quickly and sought greener pastures. The U.S. was it.

Currently, Alawar works with over 50-plus developers in the European Union and has acquired some of them. The company's top games are the Magic Ball franchise, which is a breakout game; Stand o' Food, a task-management game; Treasures of Montezuma; and the Snowy the Bear's adventures.

I paused to talk to two guys chilling out behind the FreshGames booth as the conference wound down Friday. They just happened to be FreshGames' Technology Director Kevin McCann and the president of the company, Stephan Smith. What is FreshGames? Developer, publisher and distributor, too? This one got a little difficult.

It is a source to developers. The company was publishers, but it liked to own the IP. Indeed, I was told that FreshGames did more development "than we really want to" and that there was a lot of hand holding required.

The latest offering is ZenGems.

"It's match three with a twist," Kevin and Stephan said.

Nice soundtracks are coupled with 195 levels (that's a lot! Or at least, I thought so.) and the promised, but not revealed, twist. I took a peek at the screenshots. Umm ... more complicated than Bejeweled, certainly!

What is the challenge in the casual games space today?

"It's getting harder to create a good game," they said. "It needs to be simple and addictive."

And what makes simple and addictive?

"It isn't a one part thing," Stephan said. "A good game is like a clock. All the parts need to work together and create a special, unique instrument."

How could you describe or figure out why one match-three game was more popular than another? Bejeweled, for example?

"Bejeweled is a bad example. It is an anomaly!" Stephan declared, but he did go on to explain that it was a balancing act. "A good game needs to be challenging and fun but not difficult and frustrating. There is a very, very fine line between 'don't want to give up' and 'throwing up your hands in frustration.' If we could bottle that sauce, we'd all be millionaires."

Indeed.

In his opinion, what are the most popular genres in casual games, I wanted to know.

"Hidden-object games," Stephan said. He then followed with sim-light, such as Virtual Villagers, and coming up from the rear, resource-management games, such as Diner Dash.

"The Sims and strategy genre has not been exploited in the casual gamers market. We may be coming to a saturation point of female players." Stephan said. "Core gamers are beginning to pick up casual games, and I think we will see a rise in the percentage of male players, with a general increase in casual gamers as a whole."

What did he think of price points and the proliferation of casual games on various console platforms?

"I doubt that the $9.95 price point in Xbox Live Arcade will have much impact," Stephan said. "There won't be much cannibalization. The market's big enough."

So, that was Casuality 2007 — the Casual Games Association's Seattle conference. Apart from the big guys like Microsoft Casual Games, PopCap, Real Networks and MTV Networks, smaller games distribution portals are still springing up everywhere. SkillCityGames.com was one. A new start-up looking to challenge King.com. CustomCD.us was there to show distributors how it could provide a third-party fulfillment solution for the consumers that wanted a back-up CD for games bought via download. I also spoke with Kevin Tone of Soundrangers.com, a local Seattle company that records, creates and sells music and sound effects.

"We're one of the original online sound libraries, and we've been around since 1998," Kevin said.

Skunkworks still exists. Two guys or gals in a garage can still make it big, and the mobile market will be their biggest market — provided they choose a standard platform.