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PopCap Finds Nintendo Parallel
Publishing giant PopCap has responded to recent claims that casual gaming’s market importance is underappreciated, while also stating how Nintendo and itself are both “trying to move games back from the hardcore crowd to a more general audience.”
Early in January suggestions began to spread that Nintendo’s Wii Sports had become the most popular videogame of all time. Such a proposition found criticism for a number of reasons; the key one being that Wii Sports was a bundled product in the West, much like Windows' Solitaire game.
Soon after, news site casualgaming.biz suggested that casual gaming’s market importance is “underappreciated”, stating that, though Wii Sports may have ‘reached’ some 40 million units, PopCap’s Bejeweled series has sold nearly ten times that amount.
In a subsequent interview with the news site, PopCap’s creative director Jason Kapalka stressed that Nintendo has not stolen the company’s thunder: “Nintendo has been following a parallel path to us for quite a while with the DS and Wii,” he said, “but I certainly don’t feel they’re getting credited unfairly or that they stole our thunder or anything.”
“I think they’ve been doing the same thing we have,” Kapalka added, “trying to move games back from the hardcore crowd to a more general audience... they’ve just been doing it in the console and handheld space where we’ve been largely focused on the web and PC world.”
Here you can read Edge’s feature on the isolated success of PopCap.
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Copyright 2006 - 2009 Future Publishing Limited, Beauford Court 30 Monmouth Street Bath, UK BA1 2BW
England and Wales company registration number 2008885
Will someone please explain to me why Jason Kapalka is saying that Nintendo is following its lead in casual gaming? I don't know if anyone else has noticed but I think Bejeweled is just a spin on Nintendo's Tetris Attack. Nintendo also been producing games in the past that are now categorized as casual games. I believe that Pokemon was a game that had an appeal besides that hardcore gamers. Most of us were introduced to puzzle gaming through Tetris which was popularized by Nintendo. I think Popcap is giving itself too much credit. Correct me if I am wrong but I remember that early in the Nintendo DS's life Popcap refused to port it's games to the successor to Nintendo's hugely successful Gameboy Advance. I suspected that time that they were trying to avoid comparison with Nintendo's classic games.
To be fair i don't really think the interview reads like he's trying to suggest that. I can see where you might have picked that vibe up, in the phrase "following a parallel path". But to me that suggests doing th same thing at the same time. I could be following a path ahead of you.