The rest of Casuality, in a nutshell

I was going to do a number of posts on the other sessions I attended, and on other thoughts from Casuality. However, it's Sunday night, I have work to do, and so my time is limited.

I've also found a number of other posts that cover the show nicely:

• Suttree covers the conference in brief.
• Tom Hume has a few (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, ) posts on individual sessions (better notes than the ones I had on the opening session)

Rather than cover the other individual sessions separately, I'd like to merge them, as this is kind of how it worked at the conference.

The sessions I attended, including the panel I spoke on (subbing for a coworker), all basically drifted between the same 3 topics:

• Busines models for casual games (is Try'n'buy it? Will in-game item sales work outside Korean and Finland? Will portals ever share ad revenue with developers? Do free web versions of games cannibalize downloads? What's a healthy conversion rate? Is 2% conversion really a bad thing?)
• Addressing a global market (game design issues, payment issues, biz model issues)
• Cell phones (will the market grow as stated? Will we always have to go through carriers? Will cross-platform cell/console/PC/etc gameplay ever happen?)

I'm not sure whether the 'agenda blend' between sessions was a sign of poor organization, poor moderating, or just inevitable because that's what people wanted to cover.

Anyhow, it was what it was, and many useful discussions happened. Nothin' wrong with that!

The last day, they had a "speed netowrking" event set up, for people to rotate and do mini-meetings. It was super productive. I loved that format in particular.