Back in blighty... and time to write up general impressions of Casuality Europe:

  1. Casual games are a much bigger business than I had them down as. MUCH bigger.
  2. I liked the format and venue of the event; it reminded me of dConstruct. That's a good thing :)
  3. Much of the stuff I heard seemed very US-centric. In many ways this was actually quite useful (I'm not that familiar with the US) but it meant that I didn't really get a feel for casual gaming in Europe, as such.
  4. There was less of a mobile focus than I'd expected. I still don't really understand how the Xbox can be considered a platform for the casual gamer; I can see why casual games make sense on it, but the (set of casual gamers) seems so much bigger than the (set of people who will buy an Xbox) to me.
  5. So... I still don't understand why mobile isn't seen as the primary platform for casual gaming; given that it's everywhere, and that it combines mechanisms for distributing, billing, and consuming casual games content.

A thousand thanks to Jessica Tams for organising the event, and to Paul Munford for capably herding together the last panel of the event...