The PopCap Plan

Welcome to the Establishment

Addressing the crowd of industry luminaries at The London Hilton last March - gaming giants that included Nintendo maven Shigeru Miyamoto and Atari founder Nolan Bushnell - an eminent speaker at the BAFTA Video Game Awards took a moment to acknowledge something of a sea-change currently permeating the gaming world.

Sure, it was nice to see some familiar faces from Bungie and Naughty Dog, hindered no doubt by constrictive bow-ties and lingering jet-lag, but it was the new faces among the throng - people from gaming's burgeoning casual and social quarter - that the BAFTA elite were particularly cordial in welcoming to the award ceremony.

As one of only a handful of casual developers in attendance, PopCap, creators of such titles as Peggle, Bejeweled and Plants Vs Zombies, weren't there as token recognition of their growing demographic. No; PopCap was nominated.

It's a testament to a perceivable shift in mindset among the industry that a casual game like Plants Vs Zombies could pick up a nomination from a respected fellowship such as BAFTA. Reticent to announce future games - or even confirm release dates of adaptations guaranteed to ultimately appear - PopCap titles take years rather than months to complete, while finished games can spend a further period of time in a polishing phase before release. If released at all.

Some PopCap games have been scrapped long into their development cycle and at great cost, the reasoning behind such culls quite simple: the fun wasn't there. PopCap, who claim to be flattered when another company mimics their products, are unfazed. Cloners invariably cut corners: "The quality shines through," it's suggested, an iterative development process a luxury quick and dirty imitations can't afford.

That Irish Allure

Situated in the midst of Dublin's city centre, PopCap's European headquarters is the heart of the company's expansionary plans to grow outside of the US. Perhaps fittingly, the studio is located in a listed building, a location suggesting a rich history from which new and creative ideas can emerge.

Attracted to Dublin's multicultural - and hence multilingual - resources, general manager Paul Breslin is eager to talk about how, though localisation is a key element of the studio's core work, this is a development studio.

"Half of the staff in the European HQ in Dublin work on development," he says. "We've been in Ireland for the last four and half years, mostly working on adaptations of classic PopCap games for various mobile platforms. We're currently doing a lot around smartphone games."

Though new IP has yet to come out of the Dublin studio, it seems such a prospect is only a matter of time. Localisation, however, is crucial to their wider strategy. With 17 languages among the 50 employees spoken on site, the studio is very much a cosmopolitan outfit.

"85 per cent of Europeans don't speak English," Breslin says, before listing off the core languages PopCap's games can be found in. They're big in France and Germany, with Scandinavia also a budding market. There's even talk at one point of Brazilian Portuguese. It's the PopCap ethos: where there are people with devices who like to play games, they'll be there.

Apart from its multinational endeavours, the studio head also describes PopCap's approach to the market as very much a multi-platform strategy. In fact, the Dublin operation is now viewed as an integral hub after a company-wide restructure that saw the lucrative and burgeoning smart sector awarded to its European house.

Cathy Orr, European PR Director, describes the decision to locate the company's smart-based development in Dublin as a big coup for the European branch.

"PopCap Dublin has always been PopCap's dedicated studio for mobile phone games, but the arrival of smartphones was a thinker," she explains. "The iPhone platform could conceivably fall between the videogame platform business unit and the mobile development one.

"Thankfully it was decided that the Dublin studio should remain PopCap's core mobile studio, and with the dawn of smartphones, we now have a lot of very exciting projects to work on directly."