A user-friendly video game industry?

Instead of relying on franchises sure to draw cheers from the crowd of predominantly young male gamers who attended the E3 Media & Business Summit in Los Angeles last week, publishers focused on games their grandmothers could play.

The industry has built its $40-billion empire on customers who think nothing of camping out overnight to buy a next-generation console or the latest installment of Halo. But that audience is getting tapped out -- the percentage of households that own a current-generation console has not changed much from the previous generation.

To inject the sales growth that investors now expect, companies are turning to a broader audience: people who have either never played or whose last game was Pong.

At E3, the audience snickered when Ubisoft Entertainment's head of marketing, Tony Key, showed a competitive dancing game. But the French developer could very well have the last laugh. Its Games for Everyone division, which made the dancing title, comprises roughly one-quarter of the company's revenue this year, up from 20% last year and 15% the year before.

And because those titles are less expensive to make than the elaborately crafted games serious players have come to expect, they're far more profitable.

"If you think about the number of people who own a console versus the number of people who go to see movies, there are still billions of people who we haven't even touched yet," said Graham Hopper, executive vice president of Walt Disney Co.'s games group. "As the game industry grows, it needs to reach out to a broader audience."

To do that, companies are scrambling to find ways to make their games easier to take out of the box and play than titles such as Grand Theft Auto.

One of the biggest barriers has been the game controller, with its complex array of buttons that stymie novice players. As a result, many developers are designing games that require just one or two buttons to play.

Some ditch the controller entirely. Tom Clancy's EndWar relies entirely on voice commands. Players assume the role of a general in the battlefield, issuing orders to troops. The game's tag line: "Your voice is the ultimate weapon."

"We're trying to get people to talk to their TVs," joked Laurent Detoc, president of Ubisoft North America, the game's publisher.