Why? Because computer games aren't an important part of their life. There's the FPS crowd that plays CoD and L4D, there's the MMO people with their WoW and EvE, but the people that I'd call my friends and that I'd put in the "casual" or "indie game" area rarely if ever talk about computers. First, few of my "gamer friends" play indie. Word of mouth would have never told me that those games even existed. Flock was offered, it looked cute, 10 bucks, what the heck. Steam offers World of Goo for (IIRC) 15 bucks, I heard somewhere something about it and I dimly remember it was positive for some reason (it was on TV, a show about the indie game market), so I thought what the heck, 15 bucks, no loss, buy. You know where casual games get my attention? Steam. I have to admit, I turned "casual" not long ago, lacking the time I had during my college days when I did actually spend some time on such pages. The average ("casual") gamer doesn't read game mags, and he certainly doesn't dig through blogs and game pages. It fails when your audience does not really "hunt" for what you offer but needs to be told that it's there. It works very well if you're, say, a scientist and want to be known amongst your peers, it works to some degree for underground bands. Word of mouth is fine and nice, if you want to get famous inside a certain circle. So far I still didn't see a single case of true grassroots movement that didn't at some sort gain a lot weight either by media coverage (ya know, the kind that the real people out there watch and read, like newspapers or even TV) or by being picked up by someone who has a lot of media presence.
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