Posted on June 26, 2007 - Filed Under Editorials, Industry News |
If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting, keep it casual!
GameIndustry.biz is running an interview with Jason Kapalka, co-founder of PopCap Games. The interview talks about casual gaming in general and also asks about the big players, such as Ubisoft, EA and Eidos, getting into the casual game market.
One of the questions and answer I really like is “Do you see these types games damaging
the PopCap business model?” The question is referring to clones of casual games being done over and over again. The answer is long, but really good.
“It’s a worry about the overall creative state of the industry. From our point of view it doesn’t do anything bad to our own financial prospects. There’s a thousand Bejeweled clones out there but by virtue of its brand Bejeweled is the one people refer to. There are a couple of Bejeweled variants like Jewel Quest that have carved out there own niche but it hasn’t caused a huge problem for us.”
“The worry is that it encourages a lot of independent developers to churn out these cheap clones instead of original projects. They think they can do a quick knock-off to help pay the bills and then they can work on their big magnum opus but that rarely happens. Once they start down that road of making rip-off games you never make a huge fortune off it and you end up working hand to mouth. They don’t have time to work on larger projects that take a risk. And that has a negative effect on the industry as a whole. It should be a really creative opportunity to have a small team that has the luxury of creating whatever it wants and getting to market without the usual cumbersome problems that come from publishers and other factors. The casual space should be encouraging a huge amount of creative design but there’s a lot of imitation and that’s a shame.”
I think his statements sum up the industry well. Any industry is hard to break into, but there are pieces of industries that are easier to break into than others. Casual games are easier to break into for an Indie programmer than coding a huge hard core game. Hopefully, we will see more innovative games being created in this industry instead of doing a clone for the hundredth or millionth time.
Even though innovative games take a bit longer to produce, it is worth the effort. If more indie developers were willing to take a risk with developing new games, it could further the casual gaming industry.
2 Responses to “PopCap Games: The State Of Casual Gaming”
Leave a Reply
RSS
[...] casualgamerchick) Share and Enjoy: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and [...]
[...] what 1up kinda lead us to believe in this article. They talk about PopCap’s recent interview with gameindustry.biz. They may be on to something I didn’t see [...]