Amazon.com, (where you can buy anything including weenie dog shaped salt & pepper shakers) started offering digital sales and downloads of causally focused titles today. The service already offers over 600 games - all for $9.99 or less.

To draw the fiscally-minded crowds, Amazon is even offering three free titles the first week: Jewel Quest II, Build-a-lot, and The Scruffs. If those game titles or the low prices were not indication enough, all of the games currently offered are casually focused, which means Valve’s Steam service still has the hardcore market cornered.

From a demographic perspective, the casual focus makes sense. It’s doubtful the shopper that picks up Season 1 of Grey’s Anatomy will want to snag Crysis in the same go. Lucky Clover, on the other hand, would probably be a much more inviting prospect.

"Casual Games are a natural fit with our demographic," Vice President of Video Games and Software for Amazon.com Greg Hart said to Kotaku. "We have 88 million active customers who can appreciate the convenience of the true amazon shopping experience combined with the casual games experience."

However, this by no means indicates that Amazon is content to stick with this market alone. Market expansion is never a bad thing, as Hart explains. "We always want to offer the widest selection possible, just like we’ve done with our boxed games over the past two years."

Prospective customers will need to download Amazon’s game delivery software, which will allow them access to their purchase on multiple computers.

Personally, I’ve been using Amazon’s MP3 service since it started, and couldn’t be happier. Amazon has proven that it can handle digital distribution in an easy and streamlined way, so I’m confident they can bring good things to the realm of digitally distributed games. Now, if only I wanted to play Jewel Quest...