Ritual Entertainment, known for its work on such games as 25 To Life, Delta Force - Black Hawk Down, Counter Strike, Painkiller, Quake 4, and the SiN franchise, is suddenly wearing khakis; that's right they've gone casual. Leading casual games publisher and developer MumboJumbo today announced the acquisition of Ritual to "further solidify the company's presence as one of the largest casual game studios in the industry."

Terms of the agreement were not disclosed. Ritual brings with it over 30 employees and 10 years of games industry experience. MumboJumbo noted that the acquisition "marks the most significant instance in casual gaming history of a mainstream game development house migrating to a casual game publisher."

"MumboJumbo established the casual games category at retail, and the purchase of Ritual Entertainment is consistent with our strategy to bring high-quality casual game content to the major platforms," said Ron Dimant, who left his post as chief executive officer of Ritual Entertainment in 2001 to found MumboJumbo. "The combination of Ritual's high-end, multi-platform expertise and our own industry-leading publishing model will set the bar for quality and sophistication in casual games and create a major industry powerhouse. The casual games market is beginning to mature as evidenced by an increase in consumer expectations. Ultimately, the companies providing the best content will win, which is why we are investing so heavily in the development of technology and original IP."

"The disciplined structure of high end game development requires an in depth understanding of sophisticated tools and design techniques," added Robert Atkins of Ritual Entertainment. "Ritual's expertise in these areas complements MumboJumbo's mass market approach to casual game development and gives us a true competitive advantage."

Casual game sales are expected to top $2 billion domestically by 2008, according to a white paper by the International Game Developers Association (IGDA).

[UPDATE] Immediately following the news, GameDaily BIZ spoke with MumboJumbo CEO Mark Cottam, who explained what the deal means exactly for MumboJumbo and Ritual.

Cottam confirmed that the deal is effective immediately and Ritual is already at work on a series of titles for MumboJumbo. The deal was done for a couple reasons. "Number one, we're looking to take the IP and products that we have and move them across all platforms," Cottam said. "So having an experienced and disciplined developer like Ritual certainly helps us and allows us to do that. It allows us to increase the amount of original IP that we can bring to the market at any given time period. So the primary reason [for the deal] is to expand our resources so that we can better exploit our IP that we have and to create new IP for the casual games market."
With Ritual Entertainment on board, one might think that MumboJumbo could expand its games strategy to include more traditional computer and video games, but Cottam said that's not in the plan for now; MumboJumbo is strictly focused on casual games.

Alas, what this means for Ritual and its fans is a new era. In fact, it would appear that new games in the SiN series and others won't be happening anytime soon now that Ritual is owned by MumboJumbo. "The idea of acquiring Ritual was to have them strengthen our development in the casual genre and not to have them involved at all in the action style games," Cottam explained. "If there's an opportunity to have them do something on the SiN episodes, we would look at that, but that will not be the focus of the company. The combined companies will focus exclusively on casual, unless opportunities present themselves that we think are strategic from a business standpoint... Again, I wouldn't close the door on [traditional games] but that's not the primary focus."

Cottam added, "It's interesting because you're looking at a large scale developer with a 30, 40, 50-person team working on projects from 12 to 18 months and now are going to be focusing on smaller teams, 4 to 8 people and 3 to 5 months or 6 months on a title. We believe that as casual games grow and the consumer expectations increase, then so do our development budgets and the need to have really disciplined development is going to be more and more important... Like the other part of the game segment, as this becomes a more mainstream and a larger part of the market, those that control their own IP and have strong IP and those that have regular and disciplined release schedules and development schedules are the ones who will come out on top."

"So we're taking that disciplined approach to development that Ritual has and merging that with our kind of creative and quick turn time philosophy to generate a lot of content into the casual market," he concluded.

While MumboJumbo does sell games through its own digital distribution portal, Cottam explained that the majority of the company's revenue still comes from the retail channel and going forward the company is looking at "all platforms," including services like Xbox Live Arcade, PlayStation Network and Nintendo's Virtual Console.