Bejeweled Franchise Sells 25 Million Copies
In a press release Tuesday, PopCap announced that their flagship casual games Bejeweled and and Bejeweled 2 have now collectively sold over 25 million units across all platforms, generating over $300 million in consumer sales, and generating tens of millions of dollars of ad-based income.

Jason Kapalka mentions that they originally tried to sell the game outright to game publishers when they started around eight years ago. Even after lowering the price to a mere $60,000, they had no takers.

There are so many interesting points here it's hard to know where to begin. First of all, the $300 million in consumer spending doesn't equate to take-home profits by PopCap, as there were a lot of retail copies sold, portals taking their share, and bundle deals. Still, even if you assume only an average of $6 per copy, that's pretty impressive.

This is also across an immense number of platforms - including PDAs, cell phones, consoles, and computers. I don't know if any game besides Tetris has been ported as extensively as Bejeweled. Or cloned as extensively.

And though they have been really kicking butt lately with Peggle (after spending a ton on marketing), the success of Bejeweled has proven very difficult to match. For a while, Bejeweled's popularity was seen as a signal that casual gaming was a license to print money, but the market is now getting pretty saturated and challenging - even for PopCap themselves.

Still - the best take-away I see from this story, as an indie game developer, is how important it is not to underestimate the value of owning the rights to your game. They tried to sell that, lock, stock, and barrel, for probably far less than 1/1000th of its true value. They had to work their butts off porting, promoting, and building sequels to squeeze that value out of it, and this is a truly exceptional case. But the truth is that developers (not just indies - or I should say, especially non-indies) do not generally know how to exploit the value of their properties, and therefore greatly undervalue the IP rights to their games. And publishers are often just too happy to take ownership of those rights for the pittance the developers think it is worth.

(On the flip side - aspiring developers seem to greatly over-value their ideas for games. But that's a whole 'nother problem. Rule of thumb: If it's something you could sell almost immediately with very little effort, it's worth several orders of magnitude more than something you couldn't.)

Ultimately, with all the stories of failed game studios and the woes involved in the videogame business, it's always nice to hear success stories like this one. Congrats to PopCap on a job well done.

Labels: Biz, casual games

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 8:45 AM (Permalink)