Play it Forward: Casual Games Predictions 2007

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This story provided by Gamezebo, for Yahoo! Games

Hold onto your keyboard and kiss everything you know about interactive entertainment goodbye. Superb a year as 2006 has been for casual games between the release of blockbusters like Luxor 2 and LEGO Bricktopia, 2007 brings countless exciting new happenings and innovations.

For starters, the industry's finally going global. Quality's steadily improving across the board, and the rise of worldwide studios, including Eastern European, Russian, Indian and Chinese ventures, means not only more awesome outings in general. It also assures software creators will soon be offering additional perspectives and cultural reference points to draw from, ensuring no matter your age, interests, race, creed or color, there'll always be a joystick-jabber for you.

Online-connected multiplayer gaming is booming too. As titles like The Poppit! Show (touting integrated chat options and support for earning character upgrades that award greater status within a virtual community) illustrate, socialization's the next big thing. With casual game companies like Pogo, Big Fish Games, PlayFirst, iWin, Oberon, and RealArcade all keen to distinguish themselves from competitors, personalized, interconnected experiences offer an excellent way to offer customers unique value.

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What's more, we'd venture that many game-makers, tired of waiting for a single, unified electronic backbone to be created supporting such initiatives, will soon provide individualized solutions. Expect to see several big-name amusements shortly that provide novel, cyberspace-ready features like global high score rankings, matchmaking, avatars (digital body doubles) and bite-size, on-demand purchases dubbed micro-transactions.