When you are growing a business focus is a word that keeps coming up. It's easy with hindsight but in practice it can be difficult to distiguish between focus, missed opportunity and derisking your business. It is particularly confusing in a sector which is growing fast, hit driven and where people are making money several different ways. Online casual games is just such a sector.

There are existing casual games businesses out there making money from advertising, subscription, virtual items, paid downloads, lead generation and all of the above. In many cases the businesses have multiple revenue streams e.g. King.com gets revenue from advertising, entry fees for skill games and lead generation to its bingo business. Or recent social game giant, Zynga, which makes money both direct from consumers on virtual items and increasingly via advertisers.

However if you look at the varied success stories in casual games they do have a few things in common. This casual games DNA is 1) the games portals and social games have a single minded creative proposition (what's it really about), 2) they develop using a "games as a service" approach based on lots of analysis and regular enhancements, 3) the user experience offers both accessibility and depth (i.e. easy to trial and plenty of reasons to return) and 4) they leverage player liquidity scale as an advantage wherever they can (e.g. progressive jackpots, player matching, leaderboards, user generated content).

For a start up casual games business these are the areas worth focussing on.