PopCap Games' Chief Creative Officer Jason Kapalka believes Facebook's rapid growth period will be over soon. In an interview with gamesindustry.biz (via Gamepolitics) he explained "You're definitely in the stage right now in social games where there's a lot of bandwagon jumping, where everyone sees moneymoneymoney and suddenly all these new companies appear..."
Kapalka cites the history of casual gaming on mobile platforms "It happened before in mobile, it happened before in casual – in the past it's tended to signal the beginning of the end. Not necessarily of the genre, but of the sort of golden era, where everything was a fresh blue ocean."
Kapalka says that casual games are now mainstream, citing other popular platforms PopCap developers for such as Wii and iPhone, "Anyone can look around now, they look on their iPhone, they look on Facebook or at the Nintendo Wii. It's pretty obvious that casual has kind of won, casual is the new mainstream."
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COMMENTS (2)
I do enjoy his statement that social gaming will be on the decline soon. If this comes along with a decline of Facebook, that would be quite nice.
This so-called new "casual" wave has nothing to do with the way these games are presented or how much time they require -- because I know some people who are pretty mental about these Facebook games, so much as setting timers and stuff and threatening to remove people who cheat from their friends list. It has everything to do with the subject matter.
You're not shooting some dude in the face; you are tending to some crops in a farm.
You're not ripping some dude's torso in two; you are keeping a restaurant running.
You're not on some inane quest to rise from mediocrity to save the world; you explore the high seas for the sake of it.
The success of the Wii has very little to do with the simple controller (because, amazingly, it still befuddles people) and has everything to do with the subject matter.
Not everyone who plays video games is an 18-to-35-year-old male, and I'm amazed it's taken the industry this long to realize that perhaps the only thing holding people back from playing video games was that they didn't want to engage with the subject matter. Not everyone wants to pwn noobs and shot dudes in the face.
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