Video games remain big business, and casual games are becoming an increasingly large slice of the industry's pie. Near the end of last year, online super-merchant Amazon.com purchased the casual game developer and portal Reflexive, and the industry wondered what fruit it would bear. We now know: Amazon is announcing the launch of its own casual games portal, with 500 games ready to download.

For the first week, visitors will even be able to grab three games for free: Jewel Quest 2, Build a Lot, and The Scruffs. That, along with the ability to try every game before you buy, should be enough to entice fans of casual gaming to check out Amazon's offerings. It also looks like this could be Amazon's first step into the world of digital distribution for video games.

"It makes sense to start in casual games," Greg Hart, Amazon VP of video games and software told Ars. "The games are smaller... it's a good complement for our demographic." He adds that whether or not Amazon moves into "core" PC gaming remains to be seen.

What's surprising is that the king of casual games, PopCap, won't be included in the launch. "We've been talking to them, and we hope to have them in the future," Hart told us. We contacted PopCap to ask them directly about Amazon's foray into their home turf.

"They certainly have an audience that's a fit for casual," Garth Chouteau of PopCap Games told Ars. "It make sense for them to make games available to the millions of people who visit their site.... It seems to me quite likely that we will be able to count them as an online distribution partner, in the way we do a Yahoo games or a Real Arcade."

The pieces are in place for Amazon to be a formidable competitor. The brand awareness of the site can't be underestimated, and Reflexive brought with it a large library of games and the know-how to run a sales portal to move them. Both Amazon and PopCap all but confirmed that games such as Bejeweled 2 and Peggle Nights would be coming to the service, and Hart isn't coy about the possibility of moving into the world of bigger-budget PC games.

Amazon is reluctant to talk about its power in the world of gaming. "We don't divulge that. What I can tell is that we've been in the game space for two and a half years, since 2006, and we've continued to outpace market growth," Hart told Ars. In 2006, Amazon began selling games directly, splitting from the past deal where Toys R Us sold games through the site. It was a good move, and Amazon has since become the preferred retailer for a large number of gamers, not to mention a popular place to sell used games for consumers fed-up with the low trade-in values offered by retailers such as GameStop.

This casual games portal is a safe way for Amazon to test the waters of digital distribution, and the gaming world will keep a steady eye on what the retail giant does next.