After four years of development, Popcap lit up Seattle Monday night with the launch of Bejeweled Twist sparing no expense to show off their new casual game. It took four years to complete but Popcap isn’t going to release a game until it’s perfect. You won’t play it until they believe it is a game their mom would love.
“Popcap builds games for people, not demographics,” says CEO David Roberts. At the launch the founders, John Vechey, Brian Fiete and Jason Kapalka talked about the casual game market while the “Gem Girls” walked around looking sexy and flashy. Roberts talked about the casual game industry and forecasts it growing to become an $8 billion market — not too shabby for USD $19.99 games.
Downloads of Bejeweled, of course, show no signs of stopping and Popcap explained that 40% of their revenue comes from the old concepts of “Diamond Mine.” Phil Spencer, Microsoft Game Studios’ General Manager, hopped on stage and explained how Microsoft saw Popcap’s vision in their Diamond Mine flash game and suggested a rename to Bejeweled, the founders hated the name but took the big companies suggestion on the change.
Since then, we’ve had many folks attempt to clone and replicate the success in Popcap’s flagship product. Complete with open bar, Gem Girls, camera flashes and glitter this game launch shows the growing casual games industry the great power and momentum of “simple” casual games.
Nothing about Bejeweled Twist is simple. The game play of Bejeweled Twist aggregates all the knowledge Popcap has acquired over the last seven years to design one blockbuster title. From classic Bejeweled to Chuzzle to Peggle, the game takes pieces of each successful title and combines the game play, sounds, graphics and modes into a product that will bring casual gaming to a new level. Bejeweled Twist is going to be the new bar to reach in the industry in terms of addictive game play and a unified casual vision.
Stay tuned for the full review as we get deep into the full features of Bejeweled Twist. Special thanks to Dale North from Destructoid for hanging out for some drinks during the after party.
The patience of PlayStation 3 owners is
@Street Fighter X Tekken DLC will never come to Xbox 360
I get Dan’s point, placing the DLC on the disk is like dangling a carrot in front. And yes, since the DLC is already distributed, then why not get some money out of it?
@Vivendi finding few buyers for Activision-Blizzard
Thing is, the game industry is quite tough. Spending N billions to buy a piece of it is quite a risky bet. Miss-manage it and you’re never going to recover the investment. So I can understand why nobody is rushing to buy.
As from the potential buyers point of view, Vivendi desperately needs money. Play your cards right and you can get Activision-Blizzard at a nice discount đ
@âWouldnât be surprisedâ if more aggressive PC games start to appear
Hitting a Diablo 3 home run: good luck. It’s hard to do for any platform, not just the PC.
Erm, no cycle detected on my end, always KB and mouse here.
@Grand Theft Auto V will support planes and jets, wonât have beta test
Not a fan. Loved Mafia though.
@ Question of the Week.
I was going to say ‘No’ initially, but I saw the hardware specs, so it’s a ‘maybe yes’ now. Android is hackable, it has a USB port so ….
Gearbox: âWouldnât be surprisedâ if more aggressive PC games start to appear: For the record, I got excited as soon as I heard you say that Borderlands 2 would have drag-and-drop inventory, because Borderlands’ huge number of items and weapons makes it a pain to navigate through the inventory with the consolish setup it had. Other than that, all I got that Gearbox was placing a huge bet on the PC, and telling everyone how great it will be to be a PC gamer.
@OUYA: Good for them for tons of funds, but this can also be the point where a Kickstarter goes horribly wrong. Seriously, from what I understand they pretty much said “we’re going to try these bunch of different ideas together and see if they stick”. Let’s hope they’re successful and manage to create a great platform.
@QOTW: Probably not. I barely play Android games, and I doubt any huge games will be on the system before anyone knows how successful it will be.
And yes, Gearbox are looking for headlines: http://www.ign.com/articles/2012/07/24/randy-pitchford-plagiarism-is-rife-in-the-industry