A great score will make a movie better, but it can never make a bad movie good. If it’s not fun without sound, it’s not going to be fun once you add the sound. We have this rule that if a game is not fun with programmer art, it’s not going to be fun with polished graphics. We have this attention to detail grind, polishing and making sure it’s fun. We released some games after Bejeweled that were cool but we weren’t always playing them. But there were a lot of games between that and our next hit, “Zuma.” It’s not like we have had all hits.
VB: How did you create the hit-making machine beyond the first hit? So many people have played our games and had fun. More people have played Bejeweled than have played “Halo.” Halo is awesome. Bejeweled and Bejeweled 2 have consumed about 6 billion hours. That’s how much time we’ve sucked out of the world. Vechey: It’s the estimated hours spent playing our games. VB: What is your favorite statistic about your games? With Bejeweled, we picked gems because we saw that it would be fun if we have every object be a different shape and different color. We never had a game where violence would make the game more fun. We like that we are a family-friendly, safe brand. VB: Violent games have never been your thing?
If we don’t find a game fun, we cancel it. Then we try to make them approachable and easy to play for everybody. Vechey: We make games for ourselves first and foremost. They ask us if we do focus tests with soccer moms. More of our customers are women than men. It’s one of the challenges when we talk about the company. Roberts: Conversely, we get asked if we make games specifically for women. As I continue to make more mass market games, people ask if we want to make hardcore games. It was more satisfying making a game that anyone could enjoy than making a game for just us. We were just doing what we thought was fun. We wanted to do simple games for everyone. Vechey: I wish I could say that was how we were thinking.
VB: Did you have this conscious strategy to take gaming back to its roots? Big companies build bigger and more expensive games for fewer people. (As gaming became more violent and complex), it got hijacked. It was parlor games for all ages, like Mah-Jong. It wasn’t until the 1980s that gaming became this high-tech thing for 14-year-old to 20-year-old males. Roberts: (Gaming started with simple and non-violent games in the 1970s). It never gets outdated, like “Tetris.” It’s fun and relaxing. It’s not like “Half-Life” or “Quake.” In a year, it doesn’t look outdated. VB: What gave Bejeweled this staying power? That became the start of the business model. We could share revenues when people purchased the downloadable version. And we asked them to put this downloadable version up. We won’t charge you that $1,500 a month anymore. We said we can give you the web version now. So we went to bigger companies like Yahoo Games and MSN Games. In the first month, we made $35,000, which was amazing for three guys. We created a deluxe version, with better sound and music and graphics. People asked if they could play it offline. Thank God, no one bought it.Īfter a year and a half, we considered doing a downloadable version of the game. But it was tough because we weren’t making any money. It was by far the most popular game on the Internet. We were getting 45,000 peak simultaneous users. At the time, advertising was the only way you made money from browser-based games and the ad market was pretty much gone. It was a small licensing fee (of about $1,500 a month). It wasn’t really making much money for us. Our first game was “Bejeweled,” a Java game you play in your browser. At the time, we were going to do simple little web games. It was myself, Brian Fiete, and Jason Kapalka. Three top investment pros open up about what it takes to get your video game funded. Bejeweled for the iPhone has seen more than 1.2 million visits in four months. Its other big hits include “Zuma,” “Bookworm,” “Chuzzle,” and “Peggle.” Each month, gamers spend about 3 billion minutes playing PopCap games. And its big hit, “Bejeweled,” has sold more than 10 million units since it debuted in 2001. Since 2000, its games have been downloaded more than a billion times. The Seattle company had sold more than 2.7 million games at retail during 2007. The top reason people play: stress relief. About 76 percent of its customers are female and 89 percent are 30 or older. While other companies drove the industry to increasingly complex and narrowly-focused games, Seattle-based PopCap has broadened the market for games and revived the arcade-like feel of early video games. If there is a hit factory in casual video games, it’s PopCap Games. The Transform Technology Summits start October 13th with Low-Code/No Code: Enabling Enterprise Agility.
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