![]() On the big portals, at any hour, day or night, tens or hundreds of thousands of players gather to play Hearts, Spades, Canasta, chess, backgammon and a zillion shareware match-three games. No one knows how big the casual downloadable market is, but it’s growing. RealNetworks just announced record fourth quarter and 2005 results, including year-on-year games revenue growth in Q4 of 52%, to $15.7 million annual games revenue was $56.3 million, a 63% increase over 2004. Miniclip claims 27 million unique users each month. ![]() Some other companies are growing the same way, like all those housing sprawls. Phil Steinmeyer Top 9″>estimates today’s market at around $200 million annually. Leaving aside the unadorned shopping sites, a few portals make cosmetic attempts at community building: chat, buddy lists, forums, profiles and avatars. Sometimes, these use off-the-shelf middleware like GameFrame. ![]() does better, with player blogs and pages of kid and dog pictures. But portal social scenes are, at best, low-key.
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