2004 Web and Downloadable Games White Paper 

IGDA Online Games SIG 

FORWARD 

The concept of downloadable games is nothing new.  Small free games have been available for 

download for many years.  As a revenue producing section of the industry though, Web and 

Downloadable games have come into their own over the past couple years. One of the places this is most 

apparent is at the annual Game Developers Conference, held in March in California. When our group was 

forming in 2000 and 2001, few people seemed to understand what web/downloadable titles were about. 

At GDC 2002 more people understood the market, and from the buzz you could start to see that this 

might become a significant portion of the game industry. At GDC 2003, Web and Downloadable games 

had a bit of a coming out party. There were numerous sessions devoted to the format, lots of developers 

creating these titles, and quite a few successful companies making the rest of the industry take notice. 

As of this writing we are getting close to GDC 2004 and it is very easy to see that the Web and 

Downloadable games industry is transitioning from the early growth stages of the past few years, and 

starting to become a more mature marketplace. Several publishers and developers have found profitable 

and scalable business models, and have even begun leveraging their titles onto other platforms. We are 

seeing higher quality games, with more time and effort put towards their development. 

In a similar vein, this paper is evolving from those of previous years. Instead of writing a single paper that 

attempts to cover the entire online games space, we broke the task into three separate papers, each 

targeted to a specific segment of the marketplace. The mobile gaming paper, and the Persistent World 

Games paper, will be available later this year. 

This paper is devoted to Web and Downloadable Games. It is the result of work from more than 30 

contributors, each of whom freely volunteered their time and expertise to create this document. In this 

paper we dive much deeper into the Web and Downloadable games industry than we were able to do in 

years past. We flesh out the details specific to these types of games, and as a result provide you, the 

developer, with a much more useful document than we could deliver before. 

One would be very hard pressed to find any single document that covers in more depth and detail the 

state of the Web and Downloadable games industry. Our contributors have written about the overall 

marketplace, the various business models, and the technologies being used by developers today. They 

have gone beyond the catalog of publishers we have had in the past, and this year give us an overall 

perspective of the publishing space, as well as an in depth look at several of the key players. Finally, we 

have numerous case studies providing specific details and examples on a given topic. 

Our contributors have done a phenomenal job this year, much better than we ever could have expected. 

This is truly a paper that was created for the industry, by the industry. Although this paper could not have 

been created without the efforts of all our volunteers, we would like to specifically thank Elonka Dunin for 

her tireless efforts in helping us edit and revise this paper from the work of many individuals, into the 

single cohesive report we now present to you.  Greg Mills also deserves special mention for all of the 

effort he has put forth helping organize, plan, and execute on this project from the very beginning. Finally, 

thanks go to Radu Fusariu of Fuel Industries for creating the graphics found throughout this report. 

The IGDA Online Games SIG has ongoing efforts in numerous aspects of the online games industry. All 

of our projects depend on the time and efforts of our volunteers. If you'd like to give something back to the 

community, please volunteer to get involved. You can start by visiting our website at 

http://www.igda.org/online/ and signing up for our discussion list.  

On behalf of the contributing writers and the other members of the Steering Committee of the IGDA 

Online Games SIG, we thank you for your interest in our White Paper.  

With best regards, 

Brian Robbins 

John Welch 

Editor, Web and Downloadable Games Paper 

Chair, IGDA Online Games SIG 

Senior Creative Technologist,  

Vice President of Product & Technology, 

Fuel Industries Inc. 

AtomShockwave Corp. 

brobbins@fuelindustries.com 

john@shockwave.com

Page 2 of 93