Photo by By jiazi (Tim Wang)

I read this article and was interested to see that in the first six months of 2010 more game units were shipped digitally than via retail (although retail still accounts for the most revenue). That’s a pretty cool turning point for the industry. Naturally Steam was the biggest vendor of digital games, and who was the biggest Casual game provider? Why Big Fish Games of course!

Clearly if you an an Indie making arcade games you’ve got to target Steam and Direct2Drive (as well as selling direct of course). And if you are making casual games, that top 5 list should be a good starting point (Gamehouse is Real Arcade by the way).

Just wanted to let you know about a developer diary that a friend of mine, David Mekersa, told me about.

He says “On our blog we invite everyone to follow, alongside the Casual Box team, our progress in building Enigma, a Casual Puzzle-Adventure game.”

The game is due for delivery in Q4 2010 so it’ll be interesting to see if keeping a public diary keeps them on schedule. I wish them the best of luck with it. If the graphics end up as good as the ones I see on the blog, it should look very nice indeed.

A fellow Vancouverite, Alex Vostrov, and I recently set up a Vancouver Indie Game Developer Meetup group, and last night we had our first meetup at Soho Cafe and Billiards in Yaletown.

Clearly there was a big demand for such as group because we now have over 60 members and last night over 40 of them turned up at the meetup! There was a diverse group of people there ranging from students to industry pros, covering disciplines such as art, music, and programming/design on platforms such as iphone, console and Facebook, to name but a few.

At the meetup we asked people what they would like to get out of the meetup group and what sort of future events they’d be interested in and we’ve got some cool ideas that we’ll be implementing soon. I also talked to some really interesting people and met the other three Indies who will be on the same panel as me next week at Digitial Kung Fu 2 day. I also met a fellow BlitzMax user which was great as that’s a pretty rare event 🙂

Big thanks to everyone who turned up. Keep an eye out for the next meetup which will be in less than a month’s time.