Casual games developer PopCap says that its flagship puzzle franchise Bejeweled has sold over 50 million units since debuting ten years ago, placing it among “the top ten bestselling video games of all time”.
The company claims that the series is “selling faster today than ever”, at a rate of one copy “every 4.3 seconds”, and that between free-to-play online versions on the internet, trial downloads, pre-installs and demo disks, an estimated half billion people have played it in one form or another.
PopCap is set to mark the occasion with a series of new Bejeweled instalments, competitions and promotions over the next ten months.
“Bejeweled has obviously succeeded beyond our wildest dreams,” said Jason Kapalka, co-creator of the game and co-founder and chief creative officer at PopCap. “When Brian Fiete, John Vechey and I built the game ten years ago, we had no grand aspirations for it or PopCap, we were trying to survive as a company during the depths of the dot-com collapse. Little did we know we'd still be selling copies of Bejeweled a decade later.”