This isn’t exactly news, of course, but the mainstream press is starting to twig to the fact that casual games are becoming a major market force in the computer and video game industry. It’s interesting that MSNBC author Kristin Kalning correctly points out the little-realized fact that coin-op arcade games were casual games.

Also discussed in the article is the difficulty in consistently coming up with varied casual games:

But on the smaller teams that characterize much of the casual games industry, Joe Generalist is more valuable than Mr. One Trick Pony. Some people love the opportunity to mix it up and flex different muscles. Other developers, used to spending a year creating a physics system for one game, have trouble adjusting to the bite-sized chunks that are casual games.

“It’s like hiring the president of McDonald’s to run your small front-porch organic café,” says Jessica Tams, managing director of the Casual Games Association. “Casual games have a completely different production cycle, so the developers need to have a different skill set.”

Not to mention a willingness to work differently. The average time-to-market for a core video game is two years — characterized by a “crunch” time at the very end as teams push to make retail deadlines. Sometimes, the crunches are a couple of months. Other times, these death marches can stretch to a year — or more.

“In casual games, the technical barrier is so much lower, so there are a lot fewer unknowns and a lot less crunching,” says Dan Chao, a designer at PlayFirst. “In core games, a lot of crunching happens because developers have to always be on the cutting edge.”