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"We're open to whatever lessons we can learn. "It's not that we're deliberately not learning from what our competitors are doing," says senior producer Matthew Lee Johnston. So what's the company's secret? How has it managed to create a string of accessible mega-hits, from the match-three behemoth Bejeweled to the tower defence masterpiece, Plants vs Zombies? And why does no one hate them for it? Last week, during the Casual Connect conference, I spoke to several of Popcap's most senior designers and producers about how the company approaches game design, and how it operates within the industry.Īlthough Popcap has often worked in very familiar casual genres, its designers claim to have never looked at what other developers were having success with. Indeed, while Zynga's every move is debated and condemned by the gaming intelligentsia, Popcap has earned little but admiration and respect – even after it was bought out by perennial industry bogeyman, EA.
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Popcap is also an example of how to succeed in this ultra competitive industry without making vast numbers of enemies. According to the company, players spend 1.1bn hours a year glued to its games. Titles such as Zuma, Peggle and Bookworm have been downloaded 1.5bn times, with debut title Bejeweled alone selling more than 50m copies. Now, with offices all over the world, Popcap is responsible for some of the most successful casual gaming brands of all-time. They originally called their company Sexy Action Cool and began working on a strip poker title, before wisely changing course and aiming at the nascent casual gaming market.
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It's exactly how Doom creator id software began – although Popcap founders John Vechey, Brian Fiete and Jason Kapalka always had a very different idea of what gaming was. It is a games company that started out in typical fashion for this industry – as a garage project shared between three young geeks.