Big Fish Games tops 1 billion downloads

Big Fish Games announced today that more than 1 billion causal games have been downloaded from its digital distribution portal, BigFishGames.com, since the company’s founding in 2002.

Like most casual game digital distribution portals, Big Fish Games offers the majority of its downloads as free trials that players can pay to unlock if they wish to play beyond the 60 minute mark. Big Fish Games confirmed that the 1 billion milestone referred to the total number of free trial downloads, and there was no separate figure to indicate how many of those trials were converted into purchases.

In a prepared statement, Big Fish Games President and CEO Jeremy Lewis said the company plans to double its number of foreign-language sites, add new distribution channels, and introduce content onto new platforms. (Big Fish Games currently distributes its 2,500-strong catalog of games onto PC [online and retail], Mac, iPhone, iPad, Facebook, and Nintendo DS.)

Big Fish Games isn’t the only company to reach the 1 billion downloads milestone this month. Last week, Google announced 1 billion downloads from its Android Marketplace for Android smartphones, less than two years after the app storefront launched. Apple, meanwhile, surpassed 3 billion iTunes App Store downloads in just 18 months back in January 2010, and that was before the launch of the iPad.

Erin Bell