Just heard this:
http://www.1up.com/do/newsStory?cId=3145999
The casual games market is growing in leaps and bounds - Let’s get some Java in there!
um. Didn’t we mreo or less invent the casual market with java Applets? ;D
Its more I think “lets deal with the issues that are moving people doing casual games away from Java.”
Close, but not quite right Jeff…the tale goes something like this:
A Brief History of Casual Games -
- Casual games were developed by Indie’s and distributed as shareware via mail order and BBS’s…
- Indies use Java to bring casual games to the web browser…
- Bejewled becomes as popular as porn as middle aged women huddle over web browsers in the middle of the night for “one more game”…
- Flash gains traction for this online game development…
- Flash kills applets as the technology en vogue for browser games…
- Indie developers are tired and hungry and push to bring casual games back to the desktop - with a price tag…
- Portals show the Indie wares to investers and say - “Cha-ching!!!”…
- Investers give Portals the gift of “deep pockets”…
- Portals claim domain over Casual games…
- Flash is designated purely for “free online demos”…
- Java is all but given it’s hat for the online versions…
- Portals designate the desktop versions as the place for sales and the flash versions strictly as sales demos…
- Desktop versions of the games are given a standard price tag of $19.95…
- The Indies that once wandered free across the Internet find they are unable to compete with the mighty Portal invaders - the gift of “deep pockets” is to powerful…
- Indies are relegated as servants to the Portals or forced underground and classified as “niche” or destined to be pennyless
- Portals make harsh laws for the desktop games and force the Indies to follow them or be banished to “niche” land:
“No links”
“Small files”
“Easy to install”
“Simple to support”
“No secondary installs”
“No secondary downloads”
…“OR TO NICHE WITH YOU!”
Java was moved out of the picture a long time ago. The battle’s is now initiated in the browser and fought on the desktop. We must take Java casual games to the desktop or forever dwell in “Niche land”.
Well we still have strength in palces like EA’s online games service.
But I agree we have lost a lot of ground and that it is mostly due to the limitatiosn impsoed by browsers. and secondarily by the difficulty we’ve had in making downlaoding an alernative to the browser VM attrative to the casual game player.
“Sorry, Disney Game Downloads requires Microsoft Internet Explorer.”
LOL. It’s sad.
We’ve recently created an experimental casual game for Nokia - if you want to have a little read: http://www.futureplatforms.com/fp/twitchr.jsp
Lots of nice pixel graphics and many subtlties to the game play. 
If you’d like any more information, please email me/pm me/reply here.
Cheers,
ribot
So true. Whever I see stuff like that I write insulting letters to the webmaster and copy every contact address I can find for the company pointing out how ridiculously stupid that is 
[Off-topic]what do you think about EA’s req. windows administrator rights, on the box. the only reason for that would be anti cheat, but whats wrong with a service for that. And no Run As doesn’t even work, grml.[Off-topic]
To require admin rights to install is absolutely awful for a game. They’re supposed to be toys!! I’d be very suspicious of any such software if it required admin rights to muck around with my system. There’s a lot of paranoia about spyware and DRM at the moment (which seem to be one and the same sometimes).
Cas
I wish it was only that bad. It needs it TO RUN.
So what? pretty much every windows user is already running with admin rights because of everything else that requires it.
admin rights on windows = no big deal
Windows users already don’t know any better, or the ones that do are pretty much forced to do what they know is stupid by the limitations of so many other things (including the OS). The EA stuff will work fine in the typical case.
OS X is nice that way, since even as an ‘admin’ user you are simply asked for your password when software tries to access certain things. Such as installing software that puts files in “system” folders. The message in the password dialog clearly states what program is asking for ‘admin’ privileges so you can decide to trust it or not.
Of course OS X got software installation “right”. Drag a single icon to wherever you want it. Installation complete. Too bad a lot of new OS X software is following the ugly “Installer” model and messing that up.
It’s getting less like that these days and I do believe that in Vista this is going to change. I might be wrong of course
Cas
I hope you are right… though my confidence level in Microsoft getting something security related even close to right is pretty much as low as it possibly could be.
This sort of issue is yet another thing contributing to the popularity of consoles. Computers are complicated things to deal with, consoles are game machines with no configuration or setup other than connecting the cables.