"We've kind of never made games for gamers," says Johnston. Make games for everyoneĪnother denial – apparently, Popcap doesn't look at new platforms like Facebook or Android or smart TV and say, "we've got to be on there" and it doesn't target specific demographics. We don't gaze into the crystal ball and try to predict the future – we just pay attention and respond to wherever the players are at." 2. "We have not been so focused on being ahead as much as responding to where players are and putting our games there – sometimes we do that slower than our competitors in fact we always do it slower than our competitors! We often just paint our own path, we make games that we feel great about – and staying true to that sometimes gets us there a little later, but that has served us well. "We've almost been anti the next big thing!" It's a theme quickly taken up by Ed Allard, the VP of Popcap's development studios.
"Popcap has never been about chasing the next big thing," says franchise business director, Tony Learner. We try to make decisions that will benefit the player and make the games engaging."Īmusingly, there's almost a sense of deliberate Ludditism in the company's approach to the games market.
I think it's easy to see what's successful in the market and what isn't, but ultimately we listen to our hearts and do what we think is right for our games, not what is right because our competitors are doing it or because something seems popular. "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. Forget the competitionĪlthough Popcap has often worked in very familiar casual genres, its designers claim to have never looked at what other developers were having success with. 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. 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. Popcap is also an example of how to succeed in this ultra competitive industry without making vast numbers of enemies.
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