PopCap's Jason Kapalka (Part One)
On social acquisitions, Google vs Apple and supporting new platforms
We're trying all these things. They're all experimental right now and we don't know which will work and which will end up falling by the wayside. Generally PopCap has tried to be fairly catholic and do a lot of different things without jumping on any one bandwagon. It's very hard to predict the future. You can always find someone who has gotten lucky. But it's the Vegas fallacy. You can always find one guy who's gone to Vegas and made a fortune on slot machines, but that's not necessarily the same guy you want to invest your money in.
The same problem is true in the high-tech field. A few years ago mobile happened to be the big thing, and so someone like Jamdat did very well and sold to EA for $700 million or whatever. Were they especially smart, or did they just happen to be the right company at the right time? And now you've got social companies doing the same thing. And not to say that they did anything wrong, but if you're a game company you run the risk of trying to follow every trend and they're not all going to work out.
There are plenty of trends that we're quite happy we didn't do anything with, like just a couple of years ago it was Flash MMOs, like Club Penguin. After Club Penguin sold to Disney, everyone and their dog were trying to make some sort of tween-orientated Flash MMO. One or two of them are still around, but most of them are the ones who were there before – Habbo Hotel and Club Penguin. Everything else just kind of [crashing aeroplane sound.]
Well, yeah. And we'll see how it goes right now. I think the vibe I'm getting certainly is that people are really deciding that MMOs are a bad place to do business. There's gonna be one or two last gasps – probably [Star Wars] The Old Republic will be, well... I know it's a big, expensive project, and if that underperforms, that'll probably be the last time someone decides to spend $100 million on a WoW-killer. I think they'll try and come at it from a different direction.
The truth is that Farmville is probably more of a WoW-killer than the Old Republic. I doubt that it's exactly the same crowd, but I have a feeling there's starting to be a little bit of that, and probably more so as you go forwards in time – as WoW players get older, have less spare time. I'm 100 per cent sure that people who stop playing WoW are playing FarmVille. Just because they don't have time for a three hour raid, they've got time to put down a few crops or so forth.
People are arguing if that's good or bad; it's hard to say, but from my point of view, as you get older and you have a job and a family and stuff like this, this idea of your early 20s gaming where you can sit around in a basement with your buddies and kick back and... I think I played Super Mario 3 for three days straight, that sort of thing. That's not going to happen again. I'm never going to have three days to play videogames straight. I don't even have three hours. That's why World of Warcraft is right out for me. I think increasingly a lot of people are in that position, and games have to evolve to meet that need. Whether it's a game like FarmVille or Bejewelled Blitz, or a lot of mobile games that have the same idea of "I have it wherever I go, I can play short games on it." The game adapting to your schedule, rather than you trying to conform to the game's demands.
Those are the kinds of the kinds of games that are probably going to be the big scary ones as far as the current guys like Blizzard, Activision, and EA are concerned. They're going to be fighting them on unequal terms, like asymmetric warfare. So FarmVille versus WoW doesn't seem like a fair match, but they're not fighting on the same ground, they're fighting in very different ways. To date, a lot of the bigger companies haven't shown that they really understand that, or are capable of adapting to it.