Don’t say that PopCap is one of the world’s leading developers of casual games. For a start, the company hates the C-word. And besides, its massive success at producing games that apparently effortlessly appeal to both broad audiences and committed gamers has made it one of the highest-selling developers in gaming history. Not bad for a company that, ten years ago, was testing its games on one of its three founders’ mothers.
We meet John Vechey, one of those founders and now executive producer of online games, to talk about where PopCap came from, where it’s heading, and just what it takes to make a game capable of selling 50 million copies.
Did you know what you were getting into when you first set up PopCap?
We didn’t know what we were getting into. We started the company as more of a lifestyle company. We wanted to make the games we wanted to make – fun, simple games that were also compelling – and it kind of got out of hand! Now we have 250 people, with seven international offices – I went to our Christmas party and I looked around and thought, ‘What the hell? How did this happen?’ It was never part of our plan to go big or go fast. We didn’t have any investors, it was just about making great games and doing a good job of it.
Was it easy to set up the company using such an apparently unplanned approach?
We had consultants come in and they kept asking: “What’s your mission statement?” And we’d be like: “Make great games!” And they’d say that wasn’t a mission statement. We thought those guys had more experience than us, so we had to listen to them – it took us a while to realise that making great games was just what we wanted to be doing.
Did the lack of that official mission statement impede your progress?
Not in the early days because there were just three founders with a good partnership that auto-balanced itself. So when we were young, not having a mission statement was fine. When you get a CEO you have to start thinking more about the vision of your company in a more purposeful way. When there’s 250 people, you can’t assume that everyone can have a lot of conversations with the founders and the CEO. I think we need to start thinking about that a little more.
Last year's Plants Vs Zombies
Why have you set up several separate studios rather than having one big one?
Mainly because of people. George Fan, the guy who did Plants Vs Zombies, didn’t want to leave the Bay Area. The Vancouver studio deals with hidden-object games, and thinks differently to our core Seattle studio. Dublin’s focus was mobile and now we have a game designer there. And in Shanghai they’re adapting our games for the Asian market. So it revolves around people and games.
You set up in 2002, in the aftermath of the dotcom crash, to make online games. Did you see an opportunity there?
We’re not really an internet company, so we didn’t think like that. We were starting a game company. Pogo and MSN Games were making a lot of mediocre games because it was a new technology. For the first time, you could go to a web page and play a game. Brian [Fiete, co-founder] and I had expertise from working at an internet division of Sierra, while Jason [Kapalka, co-founder] had designed the first Pogo games. We had the idea of making games for everybody, and when we first started doing it, it seemed like a new business model.
Like an update of the shareware system?
When we first launched the downloadable version of Bejeweled, we didn’t think people would pay more than five dollars for a game they could get for free, but someone convinced us to charge $20. We were making $15,000- $16,000 a month in game licensing fees and launched Bejeweled just on our website, and it did $35,000 in the first month. Jason was our pessimist, always thinking the next month would be back to zero. But then it would be $40,000! It kept going like that.
That wasn’t the model you had in mind?
No, we were just trying to license our games. When the dotcom market crashed licensees didn’t want to pay us any more, and players wanted an offline version because online fees were high.
So PopCap was founded on economic strife and undeveloped technology?
Yes! Plus a little bit of luck. I don’t think we would think of it nowadays, so it was a very good thing that modems existed and nobody wanted to pay any money. We almost did some work-for-hire jobs, but luckily we never did. There were a lot of things that would have tanked us if we’d done them.
2007's Peggle
Since the casual gaming market exploded, has the model changed?
The market has got a lot broader for us. When you look at PVZ, Steam can run a sale, but we won’t be doing so on PopCap.com, and we’ll do something different, like release an iPhone version. All these aspects merge and mesh and when we invest in new IP like PVZ we can put it across other platforms and use the core game to add more things to it – we’re not redesigning gameplay, so it’s a lot cheaper. From a business standpoint, no one game on any specific platform can make or break us because we’re so multiplatform.
Would you say PopCap’s fortunes are based on Bejeweled’s success?
Bejeweled’s success has led us on to every platform, and we’ve got retail because of it, so it kind of leads the charge. It’s got the name recognition and makes it easier for people to see what else we do. It’s like: “We’ve got the number two best-selling mobile game, and here are three other games!”
But its apparent simplicity must help players to engage with it, too.
Yeah. Take Tetris – a pretty amazing game, but it doesn’t work on most platforms any more. You only want to play Tetris with the old Nintendo controller or the DS – you don’t want to play it with a mouse or a touchscreen. Bejeweled is really adaptable and the controls are pretty simple. It works on so many input devices – that’s its advantage.
Did you have a feel for Bejeweled’s fate when Kapalka first set out its design?
The strange thing was some people argued it wasn’t even a game, which was kind of weird. But even once it started getting popular I didn’t foresee its success, especially a ten-year anniversary with it still selling well. So we didn’t have that big vision to take Bejeweled everywhere.