A few days ago MCV's sister site, Casual Gaming, posted an article, "Casual gaming's market importance is underappreciated", comparing the staggering sales numbers (350 million copies downloaded, 25 million units sold at retailers) of PopCap's Bejeweled series to Nintendo's highly successful Wii Sports. As a follow up to that piece Casual Gaming has interviewed PopCap's creative director, Jason Kapalka.
Quote:
CG.biz: It does seem headline writers occasionally turn a blind eye to the casual movement. How does it feel when games like Wii Sports get credited as the world’s best selling games?
JK: Nintendo has been following a parallel path to us for quite a while with the DS and Wii. I certainly don’t feel they’re getting credited unfairly or that they ‘stole our thunder’ or anything. I think they’ve been doing the same thing we have, trying to move games back from the hardcore crowd to a more general audience... they’ve just been doing it in the console and handheld space where we’ve been largely focused on the web and PC world. The success of the Wii helps us and the whole ‘casual’ field, if anything.
I had no idea Bejeweled sold that many copies. Sure, I knew it was popular...and I had it on my cell phone... but JEEZ. At $20 a pop...that works out to, what... half a BILLION dollars in sales!?!
I had no idea Bejeweled sold that many copies. Sure, I knew it was popular...and I had it on my cell phone... but JEEZ. At $20 a pop...that works out to, what... half a BILLION dollars in sales!?!
I was surprised too. I knew PopCap has been racking up heavy sales numbers, but I had no idea they were doing this well.
Bejeweled in numbers:
• Players have spent over 6 billion hours spent playing Bejewelled games (684,000 years, or 60 people playing 24 hours since the last Ice Age)
• A Bejewelled game is sold every 10 seconds
• Early on when PopCap was for sale, there were no takers for a $60,000 asking price
• 350 million copies of Bejeweled/Bejeweled 2 have been downloaded from the web
• 25 million units sold have sold from retailers, equalling $300 million in consumer spending
• There have been 1 billion downloads of all PopCap games in total
• Formed in 2000, PopCap now boasts a headcount of over 200.
Human-based computation is a really interesting possible future for Bejeweled-like games.
For example, if instead of playing Solitaire, everyone on the planet played a game that tagged images on the internet, the entire internet could be image-searchable in ~1 month.
