Attend any show dedicated to a sector of the videogame industry and it doesn’t take too long to discover its quirks and concerns. The recent Casual Connect conference held in Amsterdam provided ample opportunity to understand that the casual gaming market might be burgeoning, but it’s proving hard to make money. Companies involved, such as EA’s Pogo.com portal, Microsoft’s MSN, Realgames, PopCap and the rest, satisfy a huge audience of over 100 million players per month. And the people in this audience tend to play for long periods of time, too.

Andrew Pederson, vice president and general manager of Pogo, claimed his players averaged 57 minutes per day, almost three times as long as MySpace or Facebook users. And the main issue debated over the two-day event was how to convert such devotion to simple games such as Bejeweled, Diner Dash and Granny In Paradise into more cash. Despite its huge playerbase, it’s estimated the casual gaming market is only worth around $2 billion, and this includes a sizeable contribution from mobile games.

According to PopCap co-founder John Vechey, one reason is the tendency of portals to overlook the quality of their games and instead promote quantity, which has reduced punters’ perceived value of their wares. Ron Powers, vice president of content business development at Oberon, a game aggregator with partnership deals at AOL, Yahoo, MTV and MySpace, says the company had been offered 1,300 games for distribution in 2007. Small wonder the market was becoming commoditized, he argued, before suggesting that the ‘rule of thumb’ sub-one percent rate at which customers actually buy games instead of just playing the demo is not sufficient to grow future earnings.

Companies are approaching this problem in very different ways. For PopCap, a developer built on the success of Bejeweled, Vechey said it was releasing fewer, better games and looking to rework them for new platforms such as iPod and Xbox Live Arcade. It’s considering Wii and DS too.

EA’s Pogo, meanwhile, is becoming more like an online community portal, and demonstrating strong growth in paid subscriber numbers thanks to extras such as exclusive games, avatar customization, badge collection and advanced communication features. Pederson said this has resulted in Club Pogo players spending an average of 14 hours online per week, a figure akin to MMOG activity.

Still, as with all conferences, there were a few mavericks in the mix. At Casual Connect, one such was Wild Tangent’s Alex St John, a co-creator of DirectX. He pooh-poohed perceived wisdoms about casual gamers – female and over 35 years old – by pointing out this is likely to be a product of mums using their credit cards to buy games for the kids.

“We’re focusing more on hardcore players,” St John explained, pointing to the popularity of Wild Tangent’s RPG Fate. “Internally, we’re now working on games with a budget of $1 million to fulfill this demand.” Of course, the company’s model is rather different to others in the sector since its gameplayer software comes installed on 65 percent of all PCs sold in the US, giving it a direct channel to consumers. “We’re like a virtual console for the PC,” St John claimed.