PopCap Planning Social Features, More Social Network Versions of Classics

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Casual gaming master PopCap is hoping to integrate social features into all its games in the future, senior designer Dave Bishop explained during a talk at Develop 2010, as well as rolling out new social network games "based on PopCap's classic franchises."

Bishop gave the example of a future Peggle instalment showing players which 'Peggle masters' their friends are using, so they can question and taunt them appropriately.

New versions of unspecified PopCap franchises--a list also including Bookworm and Plants vs. Zombies--are planned for social networking sites, no doubt hoping to repeat the success of Bejeweled Blitz. According to Bishop, the Facebook title has ten million monthly users--a third of which play daily--and an average session time of 43 minutes. Blitz is supported by standalone PC and iPhone editions as well as microtransactions.

PopCap is due to reveal something Plants vs. Zombies-related on August 2. Initial speculation has pointed towards a sequel for the lawn defense game.

From The Chatty
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    July 13, 2010 10:03 AM

    Go ahead and integrate, just don't force me to use them... give me the option. I'm not a fan of social networking sites like MySpace or FaceBook and really don't care to have them shoved down my throat just so I can access some other feature of the game.

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      July 13, 2010 10:06 AM

      Bejeweled's Blitz mode on the iPhone does this - it can publish to Facebook optionally. Of course the nature of the game mode (a hard timer) makes it sorta pointless if you're not doing Facebook.

      I downloaded the Farmville app for the iPhone and thought I'd just see what it was like but it requires a Facebook login - fuck that

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        July 13, 2010 11:01 AM

        it connects to your facebook farm afaik, it's a companion app.

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          July 13, 2010 2:29 PM

          Yeah I was hoping it was connected maybe to Zynga direct. No way in hell do I put Farmville stuff in my Facebook profile

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      July 13, 2010 11:32 AM

      Same, i don't care about facebook, twitter and all the rest. It's a waste of time, and if i wanted to talk to someone i'd actually talk to them.

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      July 13, 2010 5:41 PM

      Amen brother

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