It is whispered that PopCap is about to be bought for $1 billion. And not only whispered, but it is already reported by Techcrunch.

Now the public is making guesses who could be this buyer ready to pay such a large sum for PopCap Games. It was bruited about that Zynga had intended to become this offtaker, but the price appeared too heavy for them. Another potential PopCap owner is Electronic Arts company, but in comparison with their own estimation $1 billion accounts for one-fifth. It is evidently very expensive for them as well. Lately several Asian companies have been regular investors of PopCap Games. Perhaps, one of them is the best candidate.

Zynga, the social games developer, has brought legal action aimed to punish Vostu, a Brazilian company for copy infringement. But look who's talking! The point is, Zynga developers themselves have been accused for the same fact! Therefore, to win a case, there must be extremely deep arguments.

Hidden Object Games are increasing in its popularity nowadays, and in this case we should thank Alawar Entertainment, which gave us: Snark Busters: Welcome to the Club, Snark Busters 2: All Revved Up, The Treasures of Mystery Island and Echoes of Sorrow (just few of them are named here). To open some sides of making such games we applied to the named above Alawar Entertainment.

Everyone is talking about "Web 2.0" where hot brands such as YouTube, Facebook, Flickr, Zillow and others deliver distributed services to a community of growing users. Just last week the Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco drew heavyweights including Microsoft CEO Steve Balmer, News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch, AOL founders Steve Case and Ted Leonsis and a who's who of the new web titans.

These new web services have smashed the old paradigm of software products that were developed, "gold mastered" and then sold into a few predictable channels. Companies had traditional barriers of increasing costs of product development, infrastructure, sales, marketing and distribution. Now companies are built in a few weeks on "mash ups" of several existing products and technologies to become big in a matter of months on shoestring budgets.

2007 was a banner year for casual games. Traditional video game companies finally woke up to the phenomenon that is casual games and announced they're joining the bandwagon. More casual games were released on more platforms than ever before. And, according to the Casual Games Association's (CGA) 2007 Report, casual games is now a $2.25 billion a year business!

But, don't you go trading in your Nissan Altima for a Mercedes CLK just yet, my casual game industry friends. 2007 was indeed a year of great promise, but for the most part, of it was a year of promise unfulfilled. And we only have ourselves to blame.

SAN FRANCISCO--In his keynote session for the Casual Games Summit 2008, PlayFirst CEO John Welch talked about "The Promise of Casual Games"--the "promise" being that the once scoffed-at genre will soon eclipse hard-core gaming as nongamers flock to it.

"Casual games are really, really big. You can tell just by the size of the room we're in this year," Welch told a packed room at the summit, taking place here as part of this year's Game Developers Conference. "The point here is we have the opportunity to elevate video games to become a first-tier form of entertainment, like TV. We will have succeeded when 'casual games' goes away as a category, and 'hard-core games' is the niche."

One of the big problems is that it's hard to define what a casual game actually is, Welch told the audience. "For a long time, what dominated our industry was 'Try before you buy' games. What was a casual game? It was a game with a Web version, and to download the full version you paid $20," he reminisced. These days, casual games can only be loosely defined as those titles that are friendly to new or occasional users, and are intuitive and accessible.