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.
PlayStation 2 fans may recall a little title called Okami, it’s an action adventure game developed by Clover Studios and published by Capcom. The original Okami title received fairly high reviews by many popular game sites, although there were a few flaws, the receiption seemed well received.
Hi guys great episode!
@Apple: I think Paul brings up a good point that there are some men that would really benefit from this as a teaching tool. I just think they need to put a mature rating on this and have Adult section for apps like this to go into. I think Jordan is right the majority of times male masturbation is mentioned it’s usually derogatory like in Family Guy when Chris Grandpa berates him for his supposed masturbating in the bathroom. They also treated it like a dirty word on Roseanne when DJ was locking himself away in the bathroom. TV and movies gave me the impression that masturbation just isn’t shouldn’t be talked about.
@Sony working on new models of PS4/PS3: I understand working on the current gen console but why PS3? Not that I’m complaining, maybe there will be worthwhile addition or changes.
@External Storage for Xbone: About time I say, I think it’s silly NOT to support external storage via USB. I also love the Xbone term as well.
@Blizzard Sues: For once I’m hearing a good case to sue someone, usually you see very furiously made lawsuits like the lady suing the parents of the kid she hit and killed. I’m glad they are cracking down on those who just break the game, I agree people cheating really turns me away from a game.
QotW: At first the only Party game I could think of was Mario Party but it’s not really a game I would call favorite, the fate of wining left to a random dice roll doesn’t sound appealing to me.
Games that I played in groups were light sports games like Wrestling, however still not my favorite. I do remember getting into fights over Bubble bobble, some people just can’t stand it when you take a power up or 1-up from them.
I haven’t really had good experiences with party games so I’d like to answer last weeks Question:
Lost Mind of doctor brain and the rest of the series of games, I really loved how the entire series would explore all facets of science, history, geography, math and logic puzzles. It honestly made learning fun.
Let me start by breaking the spell and saying that I’m unfortunately not a hunting-killing machine from the Polish woodland 😉 I went to a shooting range once, though, and I did pretty well so maybe hours of Duke Nuke’m 3D did their job…
@Apple
On the one hand, censorship is obviously not welcome but the truth is that a company can do and publish whatever they want. It’s not the government that is limiting the freedom of speech, it’s a private company selecting their content. I’m pretty sure that if it had been an app for male masturbation they would have done the same. The ‘free market’ allows the content creator to look for a different outlet that will decide to publish that content and maybe Google or Microsoft be the ones to grab it.
I personally have no problem with such an app as an ‘introductory course’ but in the end I still believe that the best teacher of female stimulation for guys should be the partner herself.
@Pre-loading
Maybe I’m not as hardcore a gamer as many other people. Well, for sure that’s the case. Still, I can’t really understand that they can’t wait several more hours to play a certain title and they HAVE TO have the game installed and running at midnight when it launches. What is more, I’m very wary of buying the $60 titles online. These are ususally games with many hours of gameplay and ones that will probably be revisited years down the line. What if I want to re-download the game in some years and the servers are no logner working or something is wrong with them? That’s why I’m always a physical-copy-first guy. Also, you can’t really re-sell a downloaded game. Taking all that into account, I don’t beleive the online store revolution will be as successful as the publishers believe. Having said that, I don’t know any numbers that would prove or disprove it. What do you think?
@External storage
That’s a great feature. Although 500GB may sound like much, when you consider that the new Wolfenstein takes up around 60 of that and that only over 100 GB are taken up by the system itself, it quickly turns out that there’s not really that much space for games. Being able to store them on an external drive is fantastic. I’m not sure if the PS4 supports it or plans to do so. I would like to have it there too. However, support for media streaming (DLNA) is something I want sooner. Does the XBone provide that functionality now?
@QOTW
The only two party games I ever play on the PS4 are the Sports Champions titles and Just Dance. SC are really fun and something everyone can play. Obviously, with my notorious hunting skills, I’m unbeatable in the archery competition. Just Dance, on the other hand, works like crap on the PS4. Ubisoft put no effort whatsoever to optimize the use of the PS4 camera so tracking doesn’t really work. Still, for half-drunk friends who simply want to make fools of themselves, it works. The ‘highlights’ of each song shown at the end are hilarious.
The games that Alphashard talked about – Wrestilng or Bubble Bobble, I wouldn’t consider party games, really. I used to play them with friends back in the day because they were fun co-op games and the ‘party game’ genre hadn’t really developed yet. Those games destroyed friendships more than built up a fun, party-like atmosphere 😉 Also, they required some gaming skill whereas the modern titles are created often with non-gamers in mind.