The Experience Music Project, lurking under the spindly shadow of Seattle’s Space Needle, is a Frank Gehry building: shiny, eye-catching and underwhelming. Like many of the architect’s works, there’s the ever-present hint of a troubled child making a poorly judged bid for attention in its mixture of the colourful and the noisy, the flimsy and the insubstantial.

It’s also extremely popular as a venue for corporate events, which is why on a night in late October, PopCap, the company behind unassuming mega-hits like Chuzzle and Peggle, took over the EMP for the launch of Bejeweled Twist, the latest instalment in its backbone franchise. To date, sales of Bejeweled games have already topped 25 million units; in its own quiet way, Twist is as important to the industry as a new Halo release.

That’s why, deep inside the EMP’s echoey Sky Church, in among elaborate canapés and hostesses in shiny Jetsons-style cocktail dresses, there was the unmistakable sensation that something important was happening. The PopCap logo generally has a friendly, inconsequential ’50s feel to it, but when you see it projected two storeys high on to the side of a vast building, it can make you wonder.

Mostly, it makes you wonder why PopCap can seem so lonely on top of its heap, with no convincing challengers for its market share. In his opening speech, Phil Spencer, the general manager of Microsoft Game Studios, suggested that Bejeweled was the first triple-A casual title. Few would argue with that, but it does raise the question of who’s going to make all the others. If game publishers are right, and casual games are such easy pickings, why can nobody else but PopCap build them so reliably?