n the first installment of our two-part look at casual gaming, we looked at what the term really means, and also got a refresher course in where they came from. If you weren't paying attention, the Casual Games Association defines casual gaming as more linked to gameplay behavior than actual gameplay. If it's easy to pick up and you can play in short bursts, chances are it's considered casual. They've also been around for about as long as video games, themselves. As we conclude, we check out the financial side of casual gaming and also explore why so many publishers and developers are getting in on the action now. Hint: Those two things are connected.

Money

With all the talk about fun in bite-sized chunks, it’s easy to forget that someone’s making money with each little nibble. “The industry is getting so large,” says Jessica Tams, managing director of the Casual Games Association. “It went from a $200-300 million industry when we started, and now it’s almost 10 times that.” Remember: The CGA was founded in the fall of 2005.

“We have 1.6 million paying subscribers on Club Pogo,” says Andrew Pedersen, vice president and executive producer at EA’s Pogo.com, “and we have 10 or 11 million unique visitors who are coming to Pogo on a monthly basis. Looking at our statistics, it’s somewhere between 10 to 15 percent of the population who are subscribers.” Each of those subscribers pays either about $6 a month or an annual fee of around $40.

Of course, even those remaining 85 to 90 percent who are seemingly getting a free ride are an important part of the process. “You can actually make more money, depending on your gameplay and your target audience, by offering it for free and not even asking people to pay for it and just having advertisements being the primary monetization,” says Tams.

With that much money seemingly up for grabs, it’s no surprise that larger publishers are looking for a handful. EA bought Pogo.com in 2001, and founded a new division, EA Casual, in mid-2007. Where video games were once widely considered the purview of adolescent boys and hopeless nerds, the rise of casual gaming’s profile is in part responsible for new business partnerships, such as EA Casual and Steven Spielberg’s recently announced family-oriented puzzler Boom Blox.

Ubisoft has invested more in the casual space in the past few years, and the success of those games were partially responsible for a recent boost in its earnings forecast. It was also one of the Wii’s early supporters, and is already releasing sequels on the platform while others scramble to get into the space.