Vechey said he was a little jealous of how Zynga has grown successful games on Facebook.
But he also said Zynga’s experience enabled PopCap to introduce a social version of one of its big games, called “Bejeweled Blitz,” which Vechey said had earned more than $1 million in recent weeks. “Before, if you asked me if Zynga would be around in five years, I would have said no. Now I can see Zynga being around — the question is whether it will be relevant or not,” Vechey told Games.com.
Finally, the PopCap duo talked with Gamasutra, where Roberts delved a little more into the strategy and psychology behind the possible IPO. That includes whether investors “can understand a company like ours,” he said, adding that investors tend to “think of us as a manufacturing company.”
“They all want to know, ‘what’s your pipeline, how many games are in the pipeline, how do you make them faster and make them cheaper,’ and that’s not what we do. A lot of our challenge will be explaining that to people, as a lot of the stock price for a company like EA is what investors think is going to happen with their next game,” Roberts said.
He also pointed again to the effect of Zynga, which coincidentally just opened a Seattle talent-recruiting beachhead in Seattle’s Pioneer Square. “Because if they go public, they’re going to define the market,” he said. Common sense would say that there will be a lot of interest in Zynga, with its estimated revenues of $500 million a year. But it will be interesting to see if Zynga hogs all the limelight on Wall Street for gaming companies, or whether it will leave room for players like PopCap.
