Casual is also a world of emerging development strategies as companies like PopCap figure out how to make new games that appeal to a very broad based of gamers. Take Bejeweled, the popular PopCap puzzle game. It’s one of the most simple and addictive games ever produced. There can hardly be a person reading this feature who has not spent some time twisting those diamonds into pleasing patterns and whooshing away the shapes.
It’s available online in a try-before-you-buy model, as well as via subscriptions and free with advertising. It’s available on mobiles via EA Jamdat. It’s available on Xbox Live Arcade where, surprisingly, PopCap is the number one publisher by revenues. You can also buy it at retail in a box. Casual games will try anything to raise a buck. PopCap’s core model online is try-before-you-buy – a free demo followed by purchase. But it also follows pay-per-play models, subscription and even advertising.
You’ve gotta feel for the guy who works those Excel sheets. I ask director of business development James Gwertzman, which lines return the best results? “It’s not like there’s any one row that really stands out,” he says. “Customers have their own preferred way of playing our games.”
Games can be bought from the firm’s own site, but are generally consumed through partner portals like Yahoo and MSN. “In some cases a partner comes to us saying ‘here’s our set of business models, please support these’. But they’re principally all driven by a realization that customers online have very different desires. The explosion of business models has been a response to the different ways customers want to pay for these games.”
He explains, “Some customers want to own a game. They want to pay their money, own the game, know it’s theirs forever, put it on their laptop, take it away and travel with it. Generally those customers are very loyal to one or two games.
“Then there are customers who don’t really care about owning a game but want to have the ability to play any game, so they go for subscription models. There are other customers who buy a lot of games and enjoy volume discount programs. Other people are only interested in cash-prize tournament play programs. There’s customers who don’t really want to pay any money but are happy to see ads every so often.”
Partner Preferences
Different models suit different portals. Yahoo prefers ads, having a large but unfocussed audience. Real Networks sells games because its audience is there, looking to buy. PopCap says it’s happy to try just about any innovative new model, but that it’s looking to limit the number of partners it works with to just lager entities. The company has grown from its core emphasis on product development to business development.
“We have a much bigger business team now, and better customer support team. As a result we’ve been able to explore a lot of these areas like retail and mobile.” But the firm says it won’t focus on its own website as a destination. “We really don’t want to compete with our partners. We’re not completely ignoring our traffic and our website has grown based on the strength of our brand and but you’re not going to see us taking out big ads or trying to drive traffic.”
The company’s development culture is one that might seem chaotic to many creators. Perhaps it’s the smallness of the games that allows this laissez faire attitude. Gwertzman explains, “We have literally no schedules, no milestones, no design documents. No one has a clipboard saying, ‘well how are these games doing?’ When a game is built the producer and the game designer kind of know where it is in the process but our games really and truly aren’t released until they’re ready to ship. Sometimes it can take two and a half years.”
Two and a half years for a casual game? That seems to be the outside limit. “Sometimes it can take nine months.