Talking About The Future of Gaming With Popcap's James Gwertzman

Besides e-commerce, Indonesia is also known as a big market for gaming. Be it local games or imported licensed games, casual or strategy games, social games, you name it. So we talked to one of the biggest gaming company in the world, Popcap.

PopCap Games  game developer and publisher company based in Seattle. It was founded in 2000 by John Vechey, Brian Fiete and Jason Kapalka, and currently have around 400 employees.PopCap games are available for Web, PC and Mac, Nintendo DS, Nintendo DSi, Wii, Xbox, Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, Zeebo, Cell Phones, PDAs, iPod Classic, iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad as well as other mobile devices.

We talked to James Gwertzman, Vice President Popcap Asia/Pacific which is based in China. In this interview we talked about the future of gaming, mobile gaming, social gaming and the $1.2 billion EA acquisition. Enjoy the interview :

Popcap has been very popular with desktop games, and looking at the rise of mobile gaming how do Popcap try to get into this market as well?

PopCap has been involved in mobile gaming for nearly 10 years --- the first mobile version of Bejeweled appeared back in 2001, I believe, and has been in the top 10 lists of best-selling mobile games pretty much ever since then. And then later, when the iPhone launched and revolutionized the mobile gaming market, PopCap was right there again – we were a launch partner with Apple for the iPhone, and games like Plants vs. Zombies and Bejeweled have been best sellers on the iPhone and iPad ever since they launched. Mobile is already a huge part of our business and that’s not going to change.

About the EA acquisition, why do you guys decided to partner with EA? EA isn't strong in mobile or even casual gaming, are you guys going to go the same direction as EA or is it EA that needs Popcap so diversify?

We are excited about a lot of synergies – cultural and strategic - between EA and PopCap. EA mobile is one of the world’s biggest mobile game companies. They are number one on both iPhone and iPad, strong on Android and have many Top Ten games on each system. EA gets casual games – just look at their Hasbro titles and The Sims, one of the most successful casual game franchises of all time.

Thanks to their acquisition of Playfish a few years ago, EA is the #2 company on social as well. EA is already very strong in mobile and casual gaming and we believe we can be a powerful force that does some pretty amazing things together. When we look at EA we see a partner that has tremendous resources worldwide, that shares our vision of where mobile and social games are going, and that’s going to help us entertain even more people around the world than we could before on our own.

Popular games will be cloned really fast, how do you response to these people who keep cloning games? Do you consider them as competition?

We don’t consider them competition. We stay focused on updating and maintaining our own games, improving them and delivering them everywhere that our players want. Bejeweled is possibly the most mimicked game of all time. But yet the original Bejeweled franchise is still the #1 match-3 game. The reality is that building a really successful game is very, very hard. Thankfully, we’re pretty good at it.

Aside from mobile and social, what do you think the future of gaming would be like? Say, in 3 years?

You know what I really want? Little holographic airplanes flying around in my living room, or little holographic zombies marching across my table top, doing battle with little holographic plants. Until we get there, I won’t be satisfied.

You're running Popcap in APAC, how do you see the Asian market in terms of gaming? Any special local behavior you can share about the Asian people?

Asia is the home of the “free to play” business model, which is rapidly becoming the dominant business model everywhere around the world. Our teams out here in Asia focus exclusively on building and operating free-to-play versions of our games, and through that process we’re learning a lot which will ultimately help us out worldwide. We’re also focused much more out here around online or multiplayer games, which are also really exciting!

You can follow James Gwertzman on Twitter