With so much venture funding going into Web-based, ad-driven casual games (both the companies that create them and those that monetize them), you’d think the gaming industry as a whole was moving in that direction. I certainly did, at least until today. But Yahoo Games just told me that starting this week, they’re going to host free, downloadable casual games embedded with video ads. (Think games that play more like TV shows, with commercials between breaks.) Fifty of them are available now; by end of the year, according to division head Kyle Laughlin, they plan to have 400 of these ad-wrapped games online.

This is no small play, and has the potential to reshape the game industry.

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