PopCap's Jason Kapalka (Part Two)

I don't think we're quite safe exactly. There's always something surprising that can come along. I wish certainly that we'd been a bit more in the social space a bit earlier. We've got a foothold there with Blitz, but we're not Zynga, we're hardly the leader in social games. I feel we least have a beginning, I don't feel like we're on the outside trying to figure out how to get in. I feel PopCap's really diversified over the last ten years, we've never been necessarily the biggest company doing Xbox games or mobile games, but we've always been able to keep our hands in all these different areas, and sort of shift as necessary to whichever platforms are doing well. We're not trying to win the lottery, we just want to stay abreast of the stuff that's happening and bring our games where they can be played. So I'm not that panicked about it because we're relatively well-placed for the future. A lot of the games are the kind of thing that we do. They're small games that work well on things like the iPhone or the iPad or on web browsers. Compared to a company that makes $50 million first-person shooters, we make small kind of things.

Yeah, and our price-points are low. I certainly wouldn't say that we're cocky or arrogant about things going forward, because there's a lot of stuff that could go wrong. In general though it feels like the industry is caught up in the kind of games that we've always been doing. It feels less like we're in a position where we have to argue about why casual games and other games like we do are legitimate forms of entertainment. 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.

There's going to be a lot of that. The truth is that there's that in every industry. I mean, MMOs, there's no shortage of terrible World of WarCraft clones that didn't really work out, and you'll see the same thing I think here. A handful will survive, a bunch will fail. 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... 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 and all that stuff. It's getting into the era where it'll be a lot more hard-fought. It'll be tough. People will make money there, but there'll be a lot of competition and then margins will shrink and all that sort of stuff. That's my thought on where we're heading with social stuff. Facebook can't go that much faster, they're only going to tighten up their restrictions. Sooner or later they will raise their rates, do other things like that, margins will just get increasingly tough.

You're already sort of seeing that, a lot of the viral growth of Facebook games is now shut down, they have to do it the old fashioned way, which is by buying ads or by having something that people are actually interested in playing and actually want to want to tell their friends about. From our point of view, we can live with that. That's an okay solution for us. So I'm fairly optimistic about the future – there's enough crazy stuff going on that you never know what's going to happen. I know Google are doing some sort of social network...

I don't know. I like Google and frankly I kind of hope they succeed. But their track record for social stuff like Buzz and Wave and Lively isn't so great. In terms of social and games, the two things they're trying to do right now, they don't have a genetic background for it. That said, they didn't have one for phones either, and Android seems to be working out pretty good. I certainly wouldn't count them out. I would say that if you're going to take on Facebook right now you've got a pretty uphill battle. But if anyone can do it, might it be Google? Yeah, I think so.

Microsoft are trying their own thing to... [pause] Yeah, Microsoft, yeah - surprisingly, they've been doing some pretty good stuff lately. Some of those things like Bing and Windows Phone 7... It's fashionable to look at Microsoft as being a bit unhip, and not quite getting it. But if you look over the last few years, they innovated pretty dramatically in a couple of key gaming areas. Xbox Live is really the model for how to do effectively a social network. Xbox Live is basically a gaming social network, and no-one's done that better. They haven't figured out how to carry that through effectively onto PC, but that said, might they be able to make it work on phones? Possibly. It could go either way. I could see it working either really well or not. It'll be very interesting.