Casual Collective: The Bane of Productivity

Anyone who spends any significant amount of time on the web has probably been a victim of it. It spreads like a virus and feeds on the productivity of the world. It is the bane the world loves to hate, or perhaps... hates to love. It is the casual game, and two men involved with sucking up over 10 million hours of time, Paul Preece and David Scott, have just created their own company, Casual Collective. The two are the creators of two well known and successful Flash based games by the names of Desktop Tower Defense and Flash Element TD, and between the two of them, have tallied over 210 million game plays thus far. With the numbers in their favor, these developers have received a cool $1 million in seed funding from Lightspeed Venture Partners (who has also funded Amy Jo Kim and Scott Kim’s Shufflebrain as well as Friends for Sale creators Serious Business), and are already releasing four casual titles for their site that will soon be licensed out to other game portals. For those that may not know, Preece is a former programmer and Scott a web developer who produced, in their spare time, Desktop Tower Defense and Flash Element TD respectively. The success of the two games was staggering as they spread through word of mouth and logged millions of hours of game play. In fact, Tower Defense alone has roughly 10 million hours of playing time and is ranked third amongst Kongregate.com and its 8000+ games. TD, on the other hand, has spread to over 12,000 different web sites, and both games have earned a pretty penny through advertising. Sure enough, the success was enough to coax them into making casual games full time as they decided, last year, to take the challenge and create their own social gaming site. Now with Lightspeed’s support, Casual Collective will be banking on free-to-play games supported by various ads that will focus on casual, social gamers. Currently, the site is made up of Minions (a real time strategy game), Desktop Tower Defense 1.9, Buggle Stars (a collection game), and Farragomate (a play on word games, but instead of forming words from letters, you form sentences from words). Also, according to a posting on VentureBeat, users can expect to soon see new games added by the names of Buggle Connect, Attack of the Buggles, Flash Element TD 2.0, and Desktop Armada I; all of which will appear on Kongregate, Addicting Games, Hall Pass, Newgrounds, and I-Am-Bored.com. Even though the competition is thick, the past success of Preece and Scott shows that they are capable of getting the job done. Considering that their first major games were done in their spare time, the new games are expected to be even better.

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Casual Collective: The Bane of Productivity

Christopher Mack

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Christopher Mack