I’m an almost-40-yr-old “soccer mom,” and thus am the traditional target market for casual games. I admit. I do love them. But the opportunity now isn’t really for me. But, I think that actually my kids will be more excited – as they are about Club Penguin – my current favorite company that I found out about from a second-grader. The business model is subscription (like Club Penguin) and some of these companies (good on them) have user-tested with kids. The biggest challenge is assuming that you’ll have a set of hits people will play, but several have distribution models that help to mitigate potential downside. -by Alison Murdock

*Moderator
Rafe Needleman – Webware, CNET

*Judges
David Hornik – August Capital
Sam Klepper – MSN
Alexander Marquez – Intel Capital    

Bunchball – Bunchball is the leading provider of social gaming services which empowers members to initiate casual games with each other – without ever leaving your site. Bunchball manages and hosts everything. And they can customize games to promote your brands. Bunchball has also had great success with Facebook.

FlowPlay – FlowPlay is an entertainment technology company that combines virtual worlds, social networking, and online games into a next generation social entertainment platform. They license their games (maybe have 50-100), which costs less than $1000 per game. Their costs are pretty low and building a community that access to hundreds is games is great.

Hothead Games – Hothead Games is an interactive entertainment company. The company's first game project is a PC-based episodic adventure game based on the popular web comic strip Penny Arcade—the series is forecasted to generate revenues of $56 million by 2010. They also release episodes on the internet and allow people to pay per episode rather than set a high price. Re mobile, waiting for off-deck to penetrate in the US.

Kongregate – Kongregate seeks to create the leading online hub for players and game developers to meet up, play games, and operate together as a community. Anyone can add their own games to Kongregate's library. Founder game from pogo.com (who has the “older” female market). 145% growth since by May – they have a small Facebook app which has brought in fat traffic for them. Average viewing session length is a whopping 40 minutes.