How closely interlinked are the Bejeweled Blitz and Zuma Blitz teams?
When we first started on Bejeweled Blitz, there was a start-up mentality within PopCap. There was this team of about five, and we were experimenting with how we could create a competitive version of Bejeweled that could be fun. We designed it at first to have nothing to do with social networks, and as we were building it out we realised, “Oh, this could be fun for Facebook.”
Everybody else seemed to be getting onto Facebook and the numbers seemed to be high, so we decided to try it. It was very important we retained some of that knowledge and culture. Two of those core folks are definitely part of the Zuma Blitz team, but we’ve obviously grown the team pretty extensively since 2008 when we launched Bejeweled Blitz.
Vice president of social games, Jon David
What do you know going into Zuma Blitz that you didn’t know when you were starting Bejeweled Blitz?
To be honest with you, with Bejeweled, we didn’t know a lot about how to operate a social game or make it successful. We learnt a lot of things about how to make use of the viral channels that Facebook provides, as well as how to actually run one of these games. Bejeweled Blitz is massive: there’s well over 100 million games played at this point, and we’re a company that’s used to shipping a game, going out and partying for a couple of nights, then taking a month off before making the next one.
With Bejeweled Blitz, we made the game, and then we all went home for the holidays. That’s insanity! Nobody does that. When you launch one of these Facebook games, you have to be all over it from day one. We’ve learnt a lot about how you scale services to actually be able to handle all these millions of games people are playing each day, and pay closer attention to the players from that initial release.
We have to make sure the game’s balanced, and to make sure we really understand what people like about the game; what makes them come back and keep playing as well as what might make them bring their friends into it. One of the principles we really believe in is that it’s not our goal to manipulate players to bring in their friends. Our goal is to make a great game that people come back on their own to play everyday, and their friends come with them.
Bejeweled Blitz
There are a lot of subtle prompts to bring your friends into Bejeweled Blitz, though. Is it fair to say you’re still incentivizing people to spread the message even if you can’t do it virally anymore?
That’s fair. The way we try to approach it is that if you work together with your friends, you can get additional bonuses around the game, but they’re incidental bonuses. The goal of those features isn’t to force people to play with their friends - there’s nothing in Bejeweled Blitz that won’t work if you don’t have friends, and we’ll never do that. What’s happened is that we’ve realised a lot of people want to work co-operatively. A lot of our features that involve friends are about building the concept of teams.