Top of the Pops

When I first started PopCap, if I had a nickel for every salesman who told me he's going to get us into Wal-Mart... and, lo and behold, here we are four years later.

I think, for certain products, there's a lot of comfort for buying a disc and having it. We kind of all forget about that. A large percentage of Wal-Mart customers don't even have credit cards. This whole idea of putting in your credit card and downloading something is a little bit foreign to a lot more people than we'd like to think.

I think retail is going to try to figure out how it can participate in online stuff in much the same way that Blizzard with World of Warcraft figured out how retail could participate in that game's success. They've managed to prove that there's a way to work in a partnership with retailers, where each party can do what it does best. And I think that's incumbent on us as developers to figure out how we work with our retail partners. What Blizzard does is certainly a model that's pretty interesting.

Bejeweled has been doing really well. We were surprised at how well it's done on that platform.

We've been in the mobile business for a long time - a quarter of our business comes out of mobile. To a certain extent, the iPhone is an opposite extreme from what the traditional carrier decks were. A lot of the carriers and handset manufacturers are obviously trying to make app stores work like Apple's. I'm encouraged that the whole ecosystem will get better, because Apple did something that's making this business more successful.

That said, there's this worry that Apple will eventually have to curate its store a little more or change the way discovery works because there's just too much stuff for people to find effectively. Presumably, it will tip itself over if they don't figure that out.

At the end of the day, they did prove if you think about the merchandising experience a lot more carefully than had been done in the past on mobile gaming platforms, you can be a lot more successful. Just that very factor has been awesome and great for us, and great for the industry, as we see everybody else trying to figure out ways to learn from that.

The Wii offered such a whole new UI that ports become less interesting on that platform. So it has to do less, frankly, with the business of the Wii than can we create the right kind of game for that platform.

Yeah. We've had some efforts on the Wii for a while. We haven't announced anything yet. I wish we could have been there earlier with a great game, but I'd rather be there with a great game than a crappy game.

We actually do have a few titles we sell at ten bucks. But it was a contractual issue, frankly. They weren't willing to agree to the terms we have with all of our distribution partners, and we weren't willing to change our terms just for Amazon.

It turned out the reason they wanted different terms was because they wanted to have a lot lower price than anyone in the industry. It's a conflict with channels. We sell lots of games for USD 20 at retail, and Wal-Mart's not going to be too happy when the game they're selling lots of for twenty bucks, Amazon is selling for ten. One of the things we try to do as a vendor is make sure we're being fair to all of our distribution partners. If Amazon doesn't want to play by the same rules as everybody else, then that's their prerogative. I'm optimistic at some point they'll figure out a better way.