First, a bit about PopCap:
PopCap Games puts pride into each game they ship. PopCap has one goal: producing fun games that every single person can enjoy. They have no limit on age and prove beyond any doubt that casual gamers exist and those gamers love to play games. For anyone that has played a PopCap game knowingly or not they have found hours of entertainment and joy from such simple designs and cheap prices. There is no doubt in my mind that PopCap Games will grow as everyone becomes drastically aware that each person has a little gamer inside themselves scratching to get out...
Your company history states that in 2002 the three founders John Vechey, Brian Fiete, and Jason Kapalka stopped working out of their house and started working in an office. This success story is interesting, can you expand on that? Were these visionaries working full time on PopCap web games? Were they living on Mac&Cheese while they struggled to make a name for themselves?
Well, without going into all the gory details, suffice it to say we were scraping by in the early days, watching the bottom fall out of the online advertising market and asking ourselves “how can we make a living with games that people have always been able to play for free if at this point advertisers won’t take a chance on the Web and foot the bill for this user experience?” We decide to try selling a somewhat enhanced version of Bejeweled, then known as Diamond Mine. No one else in the industry thought this was a good idea, and they had history on their side; how do you get consumers to PAY for something that they’ve traditionally gotten for free and can still get 80% of for free online? But we really didn’t have much choice if we wanted to stay in the casual games space so we said “what the hell, let’s give it a shot.”
Brian built a little app that produced a “cha-ching!” cash register sound each time someone actually uploaded their credit card info and purchased the game. At first it was really cool hearing that “cha-ching” every hour or so…when it started going off every 15 minutes, we thought “maybe we’re on to something here.” Then when it got to be every two minutes, every minute, etc., we turned the damned thing off ‘cause it was driving us nuts!” Yes, we were at that point working on PopCap titles full-time and yes, some quantities of Mac & Cheese were consumed in those days…now we can afford Mac & Cheese AND the occasional bottle of water – life is good!
What is the PopCap office like? Do people wear T-Shirts and Shorts or business casual?
PopCap’s offices are for the most part pretty informal in most respects. We do insist that employees wear clothes, but beyond that we’re not too picky. Name-calling, pulling hair and putting tacks on the CEO’s chair are frowned upon. The company’s headquarters in Seattle are located downtown in a spiffy high-rise, and our conference rooms overlook the Space Needle and much of the rest of the city. The office is a semi-circular space with lots of cubicles centered around a spacious inner room that is set up like someone’s dream “rec room,” with a big-screen TV and various videogame consoles, as well as couches, bean bag chairs, foosball table, and several arcade cabinets equipped with virtually every videogame from the late ‘70s to the ‘90s.
You started with all web based games, and have moved into packaged downloadable games. You even have some of them on Xbox Live Arcade now. What made you decided that full blown “deluxe” download games were the next progressive step?
We were more or less ‘forced’ to come up with the “try-before-you-buy” deluxe game downloadable sales model when the bottom fell out of the Web advertising business in 2000-2001. We couldn’t survive on the meager ad revenues available via people playing our games free online, so we thought ‘maybe people will PAY for a deluxe version of a game like Bejeweled, with better graphics, more levels, and some bells and whistles.
Brian Fiete built a little app that made a ‘cha-ching’ cash register sound every time someone entered their credit card number and bought one of our games…it was very cool to hear that sound, at first every hour or two, then every 30, 20 minutes. When the ‘cha-ching’ began sounding every minute or so, we turned it off ‘cause it got annoying. But that’s when we knew we were on to something!
Our games are now also sold at retail outlets like Wal-Mart, Target, BestBuy, etc. as shrink-wrapped boxed editions, as well as via Web download (still the bulk of our sales). Many of our top games are also available on mobile phones and PDAs, in-flight on several airlines, in-demand TV in thousands of hotels, and on videogame consoles. Heck, there are even scratch-off lottery tickets sporting the Bejeweled, Chuzzle, Bookworm and other PopCap game brands!
PopCap’s flagship game, Bejeweled, was an instant success. What was it about this game that was popular to so many people?
We’re still not sure, after selling 5 million copies on the Web and seeing Bejeweled installed on 50 million cell phones in N. America alone over the past couple of years! Essentially, it boils down to simple yet challenging and rewarding gameplay, solid graphics and a fundamentally fun core activity: matching three like objects through specific controls/movements, with some interesting obstacles and bonuses appearing over time. We knew this game was pretty good when we sat a couple of our moms down to play the prototype and they were still playing an hour later when we came back! We never anticipated it would become the biggest casual game in the 21st century so far!
What is your most popular game to date? I’ve heard a great deal about Bejeweled 2.
Well, Bejeweled and Bejeweled 2 are our ‘flagship franchise’ title and our most popular game(s) so far. But others like Zuma, Bookworm and Chuzzle have been huge hits too. The Bejeweled ‘franchise’ – Bejeweled and its successor Bejeweled 2 – have collectively sold well over 5 million units and the mobile version of the game has been installed on more than 50 million cellphones in N. America alone over the past couple of years.
We estimate that the Bejeweled franchise has consumed roughly 2 billion hours of consumers’ leisure time since 2001 – not bad for a game you can learn in about 30 seconds! Add to this Computer Gaming World Magazine’s induction of Bejeweled into its Hall of Fame last year – the first puzzle game to be inducted since Tetris 19 years ago – and we’re pretty proud of that one!
Your site says that PopCap has 66 employees. Are all these folks working on arcade games? How many games do you work on simultaneously?
Actually, PopCap now has 75 employees, most of them situated here in Seattle but some in our new San Francisco studio and our recently opened international offices in Dublin Ireland…who’s responsible for updating the damned website? Oh, wait – I am! Well, we’ll get that figure updated shortly. Not all of these people work on building games, of course – someone has to sweep the helicopter pad and feed the monitor lizard. Roughly two thirds of our workers are involved in some aspect of game design/development, with the rest handling marketing, sales, and other areas. We generally have half a dozen or more games in the pipeline at any given time, and try to publish at least four or five each year – although those numbers continue to grow as we expand our operations and increase our workforce.
Does PopCap work a standard set of hours or do the developers tend to work late into the night?
We don’t have standard hours, a dress code or many of the other trappings of “real” corporations. Heck, we left the corporate world to avoid that stuff! On the other hand we do work hard and sometimes the artists and coders burn the midnight oil – but not because they’re “on deadline” – we have no deadlines, really, we just ship a game when it’s ready. This philosophy has served us well so far and we have no plans to change it. It really doesn’t make sense to drive employees toward some made-up finish line, only to have the game be less than it can be and the employees be burned out. Maybe if you’re a public company you have to do some of that stuff to keep the shareholders happy and meet quarterly financial goals, but we plan to avoid this mentality like the plague for as long as we possible can – hopefully forever!
You develop games internally, but have also published a few games for other developers. What criteria do you have for publishing external games?
We look for games with great fundamental gameplay – just as we do with our internally-developed games. We certainly help “polish” 3rd-party titles when necessary, but basically it’s all about the core game and how much fun it is, how novel and different it is, and whether it’s complimentary to our existing lineup of games.
PopCap encourages independent game developers including handing out your own developer framework to others. How do you see independent game developers fitting into the gaming market? It seems that all big companies started out as small independent companies with a dream.
We still think of ourselves as indy game developers, and some of the brain cells from our early days are still functional, so we can relate to the small indy team working in an attic apartment or as a virtual team spread across the country or the world. The indy developers are key to keep the casual games sector vibrant and innovative; they’re the ones who really have the ability – and often, the desperation – to think way outside the box and come up with something very different. They have no one lurking over their shoulder saying “that’s interesting but unproven; let’s go with something more conservative but a bit more tried and true that will definitely earn a return on the investment.” So indy developers are still very much the lifeblood of this part of the games business in our opinion and we want to help support them wherever possible.
Based on your customer breakdown you have a 72% female gamer base. What do you think draws female gamers to your games?
We honestly don’t have a definitive answer here. Our assumption is that women like to play games, including ‘videogames,’ as much as men. It’s just that traditionally, videogames have been made with the young male audience in mind. This dates back to the days of big arcades and the first console systems. (Although the VERY earliest arcade hits, like PONG, Donkey Kong, Centipede, Pac-Man etc. had very broad appeal.) Women were never really a clear target for computer game developers and when those developers DID try to make a ‘game for girls’ it was generally panned by critics and consumers alike – no one likes to be pandered to… But if you build games with truly broad appeal, women will play them, and since we at PopCap strive to make games with the broadest possible appeal, it makes sense that women would gravitate toward these games.
Further, since the majority of computer/videogames still target young male consumers, casual games like ours are in some ways ‘the only game(s) in town’ for female consumers. I don’t think we’ll ever try to make a game specifically for women, though – not only is that difficult to do, it’s never really worked in the past and it’s not really necessary. Just make solid, high-quality games with everyone as your target audience, and women will definitely be a big part of the customer base.
90% of your customers are over the age of twenty-five. What do you think draws the 25 and older crowd to your games? Is it the simplicity, the retro arcade-feel, or do older gamers just like to have fun?
Good question. Basically, when you make games that don’t focus on violence and don’t have the goal of getting your adrenaline pumping like you’ve just run a 5k race, you end up with games that appeal to the human brain at a fundamental level. And that in turn makes them appealing to just about everyone.
Furthermore, because the casual games we make lend themselves to short sessions of playing and don’t require you to read a 50-page manual before you can start playing, adults tend to gravitate to our games. Some play the games as a form of ‘mental break’ – playing for 15 minutes at their desk during lunch; some play for social reasons (competing with friends to get the highest score in Bookworm or Bejeweled 2, etc.).
Others play for the sheer fun of it, and games that can be started and stopped at any time lend themselves to the smaller periods of time in which adults can still have fun…how often does the average adult really have an opportunity to play a game for three hours? Having said all that, we DO have many fans in the under-25 crowd…games like Insaniquarium, Feeding Frenzy, Heavy Weapon, etc. have strong followings of younger players.
Your site allows gamers to try before they buy. Every game has this nice feature; do you know how many gamers try your demo’s before they buy it? I almost cried in the middle of Bookworm when it shutdown because I played for my hour demo – it was just that addictive. Luckily, once I had a registered copy it remembered where I let off.
Well, we know that more than 175 million copies of the deluxe versions of our games have been downloaded in the past six years. And while the percentage of those downloads that turn into actual sales is relatively small, our games are also available at retail, so many people who try the deluxe downloads end up purchasing at stores like CostCo, Target, etc.
This ‘try-before-you-buy’ sales model is great because it means that we have virtually NO dissatisfied customers – if you’re able to play a game in all its deluxe glory for an hour (usually after playing the free basic version for awhile on the Web first), you have a far better idea how much that game really appeals to you than if you’re purchasing a typical ‘hardcore’ game at a store based on the packaging, and ad or two, and maybe a review. And let’s face it, we HAVE to give people a ‘taste’ of the games before expecting them to buy – we don’t have the huge marketing budgets, over-the-top graphics and animations, and movie/TV show/comic book tie-ins that help sell ‘hardcore’ games.
You categorize your games into Puzzle Games, Arcade games, Word Games, and Card Games. Which category has been the most successful?
The puzzle game genre has been most successful for Popcap so far, but that’s partly because we’ve made more puzzle games than other kinds. We also strive to break down those category ‘barriers’ in new games, because let’s face it, you can only play so many ‘match-three’ games before that particular type of game becomes old hat. (That said, we also work hard to ‘extend’ existing gameplay models with all sorts of twists and tweaks, and you’ll see that reflected in some future games.) We’ve got some games in the pipeline right now that definitely can’t be comfortably put into any of the categories you cite above – what are they? We dunno – but they’re fun as hell and totally addictive and we expect them to help push the boundaries of so-called ‘casual games’ in new directions.
Let’s talk about Zuma for a second. This game is massively addicting and seems to be successful on Xbox 360 Marketplace. It’s available on mobile phones too? What type of phone do I need to play Zuma mobile?
It might be easier to list the phones that Zuma is NOT available for :) Thanks to our partnerships with Glu, Jamdat, Astraware and other mobile content providers, Zuma is literally available for hundreds, perhaps thousands, of different phones, not to mention PocketPCs and PDAs. Phones that are more than a couple of years old may not support the game, but beyond that just about any phone can play the game.
And like Bejeweled, Zuma is pretty ideal for mobile play in almost every respect: you can play it for 5 minutes or an hour, depending on how much time you have while waiting at the airport, in line at the grocery store, at the dentist’s office, etc.; the controls and rules are straightforward enough that you can be enjoying it within a minute of downloading it; the graphics/UI is simple enough that a large screen is not necessary; and the broad appeal of the games combined with the fact that just about everyone has a mobile phone has resulted in these games being big hits on the mobile platform.
Zuma can get extremely difficult in the later levels; do you have any PopCap employees that have defeated this game? It seems to take many hours to do so.
Yes, part of the challenge with Zuma is that when you fail to complete the last round of a given level, you must start that whole level over… this does cause some frustration for some players, but it also means the game provides a challenge for a longer period of time for most people. Sure, many of our employees have finished the game, but they had to work overtime to do it ;) And we’ve certainly heard from some customers who’ve completed the whole game – though some of them had to cheat to do it! Naughty, naughty…!
Are any other PopCap games planned for the Xbox Live Marketplace?
Oh, definitely. The success of our initial offerings for Xbox Live Arcade (Bejeweled 2, Zuma, Feeding Frenzy and Astropop) has encouraged us to port more games to that platform. A very cool version of Heavy Weapon, complete with all-new multiplayer modes, is in development right now and will ship later this year. We can’t disclose any other plans at the moment but it’s safe to say that we ‘get’ the Xbox and look forward to seeing more PopCap games on that platform in future.
How do you guys spread the word of PopCap games? You publish your own products and I’ve not seen PopCap on shelves at EB or BestBuy.
Well look harder, dammit! Half a dozen of our biggest hits are available as shrink-wrapped, boxed editions at BestBuy, CostCo, Target, Wal-Mart, CompUSA and other retail chains. If your local retailer doesn’t carry them, complain to the manager (but for god’s sake don’t tell them we told you to!) *The boxed edition of Chuzzle even comes with a plush Chuzzle doll :)
As for how we spread the word, that’s done through positive press and reviews, as well as tons of word-of-mouth. When one soccer mom sees another having fun on her laptop or mobile phone, they want to know what it is that’s taking the player to such an enjoyable mental place while everyone else is twiddling their thumbs. So the ‘pass-along’ phenomenon is definitely a big part of our success, and we have many stories of people getting their bosses, their spouses, their psychiatrists or even their entire families hooked on our games.
It seems that many retail outlets only cater to large publishers like Electronic Arts, Activision, UbiSoft, Sega, and other popular companies. Is there no shelf room for Independent game companies or do Indies just not have the cash to produce boxed games?
This has been true historically but is changing. As retailers wake up to the fact that nearly *everyone* who comes into a Wal-Mart is a potential buyer of a broadly appealing computer/videogame, they will increasingly stock games like ours. That, and the fact that casual games sell for less than half of the typical hard-core game makes casual games a great ‘impulse buy’ that retailers love. It’s already happening, and will happen more in future!
PopCap recognizes the “casual gamer,” but how do you define the habits of a casual gamer?
We’re actually conducting a survey next month to attempt to define some of this. Basically, a typical casual gamer is a 40-something woman seeking a form of leisure-time entertainment that’s more engaging than TV, more fun that reading a newspaper, and can be available when the mood strikes for 15 minutes of fun. As to exactly how customers view the playing of our games versus other activities in their lives, that will hopefully be among the answers we glean from the survey – stay tuned!
There are many people out there that would be great “casual gamers” but have not found their games yet. Is there any good strategy to get new people involved in gaming so that they too can enjoy gaming casually?
Well, our strategy is to try to raise awareness of casual games in general – through stories in newspapers, magazines, on TV and radio, and of course on the Web. We haven’t done much advertising in the past, but are starting to do more, and that will also make more people aware of the games. Combine that with the fact that people LIKE to share their discovery of casual games with others, and we’re starting to see a real groundswell of consumers playing casual games. Depending on which research numbers you believe, there are now between 150 million and 300 million people playing casual games on a regular basis – not bad for a ‘little-known leisure-time activity’ :)
I am sure you have heard of the Nintendo Wii and how they seem to be targeting new gamers and creating a more casual gaming environment. What are your thoughts on their goal to bring in new gamers? Do you see this as a successful maneuver or should console companies just focus on the die hard gamers?
Console makers are now aware that their original audience is aging and they need to find ways to reach a broader audience, including older gamers and women. There’s no reason why these other parts of the overall consumer base couldn’t be enticed to purchase a videogame console – if the right games were presented to them. Whether those ‘casual gamers’ can eventually be “upsold” to more hardcore titles remains to be seen, but even if they can’t, this broader audience is so much bigger than the 12-28 year old male consumer base that you can make money this way even if it’s $5 or $10 at a time.
Many gamers would love to say “I build games for a living” - Do you have any inspiring thoughts for gamers that want to move into the game development industry?
Well, it’s simplistic and somewhat hackneyed, but the key is “do what you love.” We’ve seen a fair number of artists and developers from the hardcore side of the business migrate to the casual games space with an attitude of “well, this isn’t my cup of tea, but it’s where the money is at the moment, so what the hell.” That’s no way to make a living – or have a life! To make great casual games you need to play and enjoy them, otherwise you’re just guessing at what people will like or mimicking what’s already out there – and that’s no fun and not the way to be successful, ultimately.
We'd like to thank PopCap for taking the time out of their busy development schedules to answer some of our questions. Check out PoPCap games at PopCap.com
For a copy of the Interview with high resolution graphics and sweet layout, checkout 2o2p Magazine Issue #6
