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.
Ex-Ensemble Studios Folks Form
Hi guys!
First of all: congratulations to 500 episodes 🙂 There are not many (good) podcasts who have so many long episode. Long because nearly every podcast of your show is about an hour. It´s nice to hear Paul again on the show .. he has such a nice humor, i love it 😀
Regarding the topics in this episode: i really like POP Figures 🙂 I have all 11 from Magic The Gathering, all from Back to the future and all from Michael Jackson. i like them as decoration for my gaming room 🙂
These games like skylanders, Lego Dimensions and so on: i dont like it that much .. its too expensive and the game itself is not that … intersting in my opinion :/
It was nice to hear, that you are Star Trek Fans (or something similar like that ^^). Did you watch the latest series? Discovery? It think it was quite nice so far, even if it was strange to see the Klingons like that 🙂
To the question of the week: my choice of the Parker Boardgame would be Monopoly, because i played so often as a little kid (ok i did not have any other boardgame …).
Keep on the good work guys and thanks again for your Podacst!
Greetings from germany,
Ralf
sorry forget something: the new title song is way better then the one before 🙂 but not as good as the one you had very man epidsodes ago. I already told it Jonah, but i dont know which episode it was (not the Robocop or Mass effect one).