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Portal Might Bring the Casuals

By Warren Stallworth on Monday, February 4, 2008 at 4:30 PM EST  

Portal Bringing the Mainstream Audience

If you haven’t played Portal yet, you need to get on it. It’s one of the best games made in the last decade. So much, in fact, that Wagner James Au over at GigaOM is theorizing that it could lead to an industry shift.

Casual gaming is a huge market, shown by the number of flash, poker, and bejeweled sites on the internet, but core gaming has yet to cross over into that lucrative market. The Wii is trying, but it’s still has a struggle on its hands. Portal, on the other had, is a non-violet, low-budget puzzle game that lasts about 6 or 7 hours and is addictive. It’s the kind of game you could get a non-gamer to play, with mechanics from hardcore FPS but gameplay straight out of nothing else. It’s selling like gang busters and shows no signs of stopping, and the ending theme song has crossed over into the casual market space. If anything, Portal is the game to lead the way to mainstream revenue.

Other developers are more than likely looking at the success of Portal and prepping their own crossover games as we speak. In two or three years, you might be sharing (read: fighting for) your computer space with your significant other, who was never a gamer before but thanks to the likes of Portal, digs them now. You’ve been warned.

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Comments

4 Responses to “Portal Might Bring the Casuals”

  1. Portal fan on February 4th, 2008 6:38 pm

    Don’t miss out on the flash version of portal. Have been playing it since I read about it on gigaom.

    http://www.multigames.com/game/Portal_The_Flash_Version-kshavRlq

  2. Warren Stallworth on February 5th, 2008 7:02 pm

    I rather enjoyed playing that version of the game. I’ve had a chance to play Portal and it definitely is something different. I’ll have to do the ultimate test and see if my mother likes playing it. That won’t really work on my sister and fiancee, who are both big gamers (fiancee plays WoW, Wii, PS1, Saturn, and DS regularly and my sister owns an N64, and DS, and plans on getting a Wii).

  3. Edward on March 12th, 2008 12:08 am

    I’ve played the flash version of Portal. I must say, the flash version was just as fun as the original version. The original Portal was addictive, fun, and during the escape chapters, challenging at some points.

  4. vicky on August 20th, 2008 12:30 pm

    i really enjoyed playing this game portal but cant seem to download it can u help please

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