Independent Gaming: PopCap Interview

Tuesday, June 26, 2007

Excerpt from GamesIndustry.biz:

Too many developers are making "cheap knock-offs" of successful games and holding back growth of the casual games market, according to Jason Kapalka, chief creative officer at PopCap Games.

With low development costs, studios are able to churn out copycat games in a short time, but these titles rarely make enough money for developers to grow past a hand-to-mouth existence, says the PopCap founder.

"Very few games are developed without reference to past games. There's always going to be titles that build on a previous mechanic or game. But there's a fine line between that and very bold-faced rip-offs that aren't adding anything to the game and are just trying to make a quick buck," said Kapalka, in an interview with GamesIndustry.biz.

Read more, full interview [source: Teeth]

Posted at 4:01 AM by lemeza

Post a Comment

CosMind said at 6/26/2007 11:38:00 AM:

ouch. pretty harsh statements considering the fact that one of the games that put popcap on the map - zuma - is about as blatant of a complete ripoff of mitchell corp.'s puzzloop as a game possibly could be...

miyamoto-SAN said at 6/26/2007 02:11:00 PM:

Agreed with cosmind.

haowan said at 6/26/2007 03:45:00 PM:

heh, that was my first post on indygamer for AGES.

Anonymous said at 6/27/2007 01:18:00 AM:

Aside from that hilarious bit, the chapter about XBLA is quite funny too. For an exemple, Zuma is available there for roughly 8,5 euros (800 points), while it costs 20 euros on the PC side. I really wonder what could boost sells on XBLA, since smaller prices will _never_ help sales according to 20 years of game publishers' propaganda ;)

CosMind said at 6/27/2007 09:51:00 AM:

@anonymous

what could boost live arcade sales?

how about developers creating games/content that's actually appealing to the cats who play 360/live arcade :)