Pegging the future of casual games
More countries
International markets are a major opportunity for casual games, which are often so visually-based that they require little localization. Show non-English-speaking people Bejeweled, for example, and they "get it" as quickly as native English speakers.
PopCap is increasing its presence in Asia, including a major partnership with Square Enix that has our games selling on big portals in Japan. Asia is also big on multiplayer or community-based games, which can open more doors for casual games.
To build these international markets, we opened PopCap International in early '06 to complement the 100 or so employees at our Seattle headquarters and our San Francisco and Chicago development studios. PopCap International, based in Dublin, Ireland, has grown to more than 30 employees who work on everything from product localization to mobile games development, marketing, sales and business development.
More game sophistication
As more developers join the market, broad-appeal games will become more visually sophisticated and creative, sometimes spawning all-new genres of casual games. PopCap's Bookworm Adventures, for example, is a first-time combo of a casual word game plus a traditional fantasy role-playing game. It took us over two years to develop, and has been received very well by our target customers - in fact, it's been breaking sales records since its launch in late 2006.
In the future, we hope to strike a balance between creating bread-and-butter, traditional puzzle and arcade games - like Bejeweled, Zuma and Bookworm - and expanding into more experimental projects - like Bookworm Adventures and other titles that blend elements and archetypes from hardcore games with the PopCap magic we're known for.
But whatever we do, it's always gonna be fun!
“Creating casual games that are different than what has been previously released is hard, but it's important and it's worth doing.”
-- Jason Kapalka, PopCap founder
