SharkJumping

One way to measure the interest and money involved in a particular sector is to track the rise and fall of its trade show activity since it tends to follow the money.  At the peak of the bubble in 2001, it felt like there were more than five digital music conferences, while 2 years later, the sole remaining Jupiter Plug-In event had a grand total of 5 vendors showing their wares and the conference felt like a ghost town. 

In the casual game sector, the first ever conference was held a few months ago (which was quite successful and which pushed me to start blogging - see post), and now we already have two announced for 2006, cleverly located in the same city 1.5 months apart.  The organizer of this year's Casual Game Conference, Chris Sherman's Game Initiative, will do a repeat performance in Seattle July 13th and 14th.  And now we have a new entrant, supported by the non-profit Casual Games Association, which has split with Game Initative in order to organize a show in Seattle at the end of August.  I'm sure there is some sort of back story involved and I don't have a position on either one, but right now it's just creating confusion among the pretty tight-knit casual games community.

The good news is that the sector now commands enough attention and revenue (will see a lot more investors this year) that it's worthy of this type of competition - but they should probably either merge the shows or separate them out more by time and location to provide enough value to the attendees, not all of whom in this business have large travel budgets.  However, it looks at this point like the game of chicken will continue.