While hard-core video games remain multi-billion-dollar cash cows, there is an untapped mother lode in games as simple as puzzles, experts said on Thursday at the world's premier trade show.
As thousands of cultish gamers jammed exhibition halls crammed with the latest action games for Sony, Microsoft or Nintendo consoles, a panel of analysts said the surging sector of the market was "casual games".
"There is a huge untapped market of people who haven't been bitten by the video-game-playing bug," said Anita Frazier, an entertainment industry analyst with NPD Group in the United States.
Sales of console-based video games peaked in Japan in 2001 and have trailed downward ever since, according to Hiroshi Kamide, an analyst at KBC Securities in that country.
"The key message from Japan is that if you don't have casual content you don't have outlook for growth at all," Kamide said.
"You need casual games, not splashy, but interesting and different. Then, you will do pretty well."
The second-hand and rental game gear markets that allied with poor economic conditions to undermine the console video game market in Japan were likely to spill west to the United States, warned Kamide.
At least one Japanese video game company was "cleaning up" by getting children and their parents to play "brain games" with low development costs and high profit margins, Kamide said.
Many casual gaming sites are being developed on the premise people can play for free as long as they wish, but pay nominal fees to "jazz up" a game by customizing characters or adding features or levels of play, Kamide said.
"People are very happy to try them," Kamide said of the simple, free games.
Increasingly common "micro payment" software allows players to buy features for small change, essentially "recreating those days when you would go to an arcade with a bag of quarters," one mobile game maker said.
Micro payment systems have given rise to online virtual worlds in which players buy land, work jobs, invest and more in a synthesized cash economy.
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