Skype is aggressively pushing into the casual gaming market, hoping to boost its popularity among users through this addictive social-networking feature.

Already implemented in instant messaging clients like MSN Messenger or Yahoo Messenger, casual games are an important feature of the social networking, but also a source for advertisement-driven revenues, since most games are accompanied by commercial from sponsors.

Skype (now the property of eBay) announced, through the voice of Paul Amery, who delivered a keynote at the TMC Communications Developer Conference yesterday, that the peer-to-peer VoIP application is no longer used only for free chatting with friends all over the globe, and the recent success registered by Skype Extras like CrazyTalk, TalkandWrite or (my favorite) KishKish Lie Detector. Skype officials have released the free extras in order to enhance the Skype experience and move it beyond the initial purpose of connecting people only through voice.

"People are increasingly using Skype to interact with one another, with many choosing to play simple games like checkers or backgammon," Amery said at the keynote. "However, the tremendous size of Skype's user base makes it an ideal environment for multi-player and community-based games in which people can play against or collaborate with one another."

The Skype official has also provided some statistics concerning the extras program, inaugurated with the version 3.0 of the application: people all over the world have downloaded them more than 18 million times, and 5 million of those extras have been games.

Because of this, Skype thought at creating a special channel called, well, Skype Game Channel, which is a partnership with Easybits Software. The Game Channel stems from the Game Developer Program started at the end of 2006, and the company says that it will supply devs with all the SDKs, APIs, tools, information, and support they need in order to make their games Skype-compatible. If the games are less than 10MB to download they will hosted on Skype’s servers, for larger games additional arrangements may be required. However, once a game is developed and approved, Skype says that it will handle all of the distribution, marketing, billing, and DRM issues.

"We hope the Skype Game Channel becomes a popular entertainment destination within the Skype community," Avery said. "Our goal is to make it as easy and profitable as possible for the developers while keeping it simple and fun for consumers to use."