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| PopCap Games to Sponsor New Casual Game Award PopCap Games, developer and publisher of casual games for Web, PC/Mac, mobile phones and other digital entertainment platforms, announced that it has signed an agreement with the organizers of the Slamdance 2006 independent film festival, to be a primary sponsor of the event's Gamemaker Awards Night. At the same time, PopCap and the Slamdance Festival announced the addition of a new "Best Casual Game" award to the event's Guerilla Gamemaker Competition. Senior members of PopCap's game design and development teams will serve as judges for the new award category and will present the award to the developer whose submitted work best demonstrates the virtues of a successful casual game: simple, addictive, and fun. The grand prize winner will be considered for worldwide publication under the PopCap label. More information on Slamdance 2006, being held January 19 - 27, 2006 in Park City, Utah, can be found at www.slamdance.com. (PopCap's free casual game framework, which accelerates the development for any game, is available athttp://developer.popcap.com/.) In addition to publishing their own internally-developed games, PopCap also publishes third-party games from independent casual game developers, such as the recently-launched Bonnie's Bookstore(TM) from New Crayon Games. PopCap's support of independent game developers also includes a framework, freely available athttp://developer.popcap.com/,which dramatically speeds up the development time for new games. This is the same framework that PopCap itself uses to produce its own award-winning games. PopCap's senior game design and development staffers will spend a total of more than five weeks playing, evaluating and debating the merits of the games submitted for this year's competition, ultimately picking the one that they feel would best appeal to the casual game audience. Specifically, the judging of submissions will be based on three primary areas: simplicity, addictive core game-play, and overall fun. PopCap senior executives will also be on hand to present the grand prize to the winner of the competition as part of the Gamemaker Awards Night taking place at Slamdance on the evening of Tuesday, January 24, 2006. The casual games sector - comprising family-friendly puzzle, word, trivia and arcade-style games - has experienced tremendous growth in recent years. More than 100 million consumers now play such games on a regular basis and according to industry research firms approximately 53 percent of those players are female and two thirds are over age 35. While the casual games sector has ballooned to projected revenues of more than $500 million in 2005, many of the most innovative games in the category are still created by small teams of developers working independently of large publishers. write your comments about the article :: © 2005 Game News :: home page |