PopCap Goes International

Gamasutra reports on PopCap Games' expansion to international markets. From the article: "Based in Dublin, Ireland, the new operations center will serve as a local hub for PopCap's European and Asian business activities, as well as studio facilities for international games and new title development. According the company, the studio has initially launched with around 12 employees. Newly-localized PopCap games for some European markets will be launched this quarter, and international versions of www.popcap.com are expected in the first half the year. "

Re:Isn't the Interweb everywhere already?

[Lerc]

Actually it is a bit of an issue making games for different countries. I'm in New Zealand and I get interesting feedback regarding my games from the US. It's usually little things that you have to change to consider.

For instance in my game Fitznik (http://www.screamingduck.com/Fitznik.php [screamingduck.com]) it was a tough decisiion on one of the death messages. When you blow yourself up with one of you own bombs, you may get the message "Go Darwin!" This may not go down too well in some parts of the states.

In the end I decided that given the game is a puzzle game with actual difficult puzzles, those who would be inclined to be offended wouldn't be up to playing the game anyway.

Another issue is promotion. Different games do well in different areas.
By and large the american audience seems to hate Drippy ( http://www.screamingduck.com/Drippy.php [screamingduck.com] ) but people in other parts of the world seem to think it's quite neat.

It would work out better to promote games, more targeted for the region.

And finally. The interweb is everywhere, that means you deal with people at all hours. Having an office on the other side of the world can be handy if you need to have stuff done while you are asleep.

Re:Drippy == Pnickies?

[Lerc]

There are two reasons for that text.

Firstly, The gameplay is still rather different to Pnikies. The blobs and stars are the common elements. The controls are totally different.

Secondly, I paid someone to write the text on my site and she hsa never seen Pnickies. As for myself, I got the idea for Drippy from Pnickies, but I couldn't for the life of me remember the name of the game.

The main difference between the two are the way things fall. In Drippy mutliple things fall simultaneoulsy and you can only manipulate them at the top, It's also better to play using a mouse. In Pnickies I believe you control set pieces one at a time as they fall. Chances are if you like one you'll probably like the other though.

It's an interesting way to develop a game, working from the faded memory of another title. You take new directions in the areas where your memory fails you. I did this once before with a game that I based on the Apple II game serpentine. I only saw the apple game once and I wrote my thing in 1993 or 4 so While I achieved a degree of visual similarity the gameplay was quite different. In more recent years I downloaded a version of serpentine for and emulator and found that I didn't much like the original anyway, go figure :-)