PopCap's Jason Kapalka (Part Two)

In some ways they almost are. And frankly if Oracle and Google beat each other up, Microsoft might be the winner. That'll give Windows Phone 7 a lot of breathing room that they probably need.

Yeah.... Most of that stuff's just protective. There's an issue that if you don't get those URLs and trademarks some guy squats on them and eventually you have to pay him a bunch of money. As far as brands go, they have some value. There's no question that in some markets, like iPhone for example, it is pretty important. The iPhone App Store is such a Darwinian environment where stuff comes out there and if you can't immediately get onto the top 10 charts you can easily just vanish. There's no real way to market there, there's no real way to buy ads, so a brand is the only thing you have, the only predictable way to get yourself noticed on the App Store.

There's unpredictable ways – there's fluke hits like Angry Birds or Doodle Jumps that come out of nowhere, but again it's the lottery win thing. Those two have done well, they're good games, but there's tens of thousands of other games out there. There's a lot of luck involved.

If Plants vs Zombies had been released on the iPhone first, it might have disappeared without a trace, but because it had a recognisable brand, because it was released on PC and Mac first, that actually built up a lot of interest, so people bought it. And then you have that cycle where because it's on the top 10 a lot more people buy it. It's a bit unfair, the rich get richer syndrome, but there's nothing you can do about that. Apple can probably do better, they're trying to do stuff like Genius to help recommend things, and it might help give some things a bit of a long tail, but until something like that happens, you really have to do your best to get them into that top ten. So brand is important there.

I think it's less important in lots of other emerging areas. It's not particularly important on Facebook; people might believe that Bejewelled is doing well on Facebook because it's Bejewelled, but there's a lot of other branded games on Facebook that failed – from Tetris to FIFA and all these things like that. And they've all done poorly, or at best mediocre. The viral growth is much more important – it's the same in casual and downloadable games. The brand would get someone to try it, but it had very little effect on whether they would purchase anything or not. So it was less important than a game that had a high conversion rate. The good thing about the casual downloadable space was it really forced them to make good games, because there's no possible way to sucker someone.