By Ryan Olson

In the business of casual games, PopCap is a household name. In the past five years players have downloaded more than 200 million copies of the company’s iconic games, which include Bejeweled, Zuma, and Chuzzle. PopCap.com now handles nearly 6 million unique visitors each month, and in addition to success on the PC, PopCap games can now be found on mobile phones, iPods, and Xbox Live Arcade—Microsoft’s online gaming service for its Xbox console.

The company has become a big part of the growing casual game market, which IDC predicts will surpass $2 billion in the U.S. by 2010, up from $420 million today.

PopCap's latest title, Bookworm Adventures, launched this month after spending two and a half years in development with a budget of more than $700,000. Fans of the original Bookworm will immediately recognize the main character Lex, a bespectacled green annelid with a penchant for creating words Scrabble-style using a mishmash pool of letters.

Blending word creation with roleplaying elements, the new title has players helping Lex using their spelling skills to battle villains, find treasure, score power-ups, and cruise through several different storylines. According to PopCap, the game’s easy accessibility and immersive gameplay represent the future of casual games.

We talked with PopCap CEO Dave Roberts and PopCap.com director and company cofounder John Vechey recently about everything from how PopCap makes games to the evolving casual games market and where startup opportunities can be found. Excerpts from the conversation follow.

Q: You guys have made some very well-known games. How does your development process work?

Mr. Roberts: We kill more games than most others start. Our core studio values are “prototyping plus iteration plus polish equals great games.” We don’t think our customers have time to sift through a game a day [like] on Big Fish.

Q: What about pricing schemes for casual games? Bookworm Adventures is $30.

Mr. Roberts: The product is so deep we think it’s worth a try. The thing I like about this game – you can get completely wrapped up in the story but you don’t have to.

At the end of the day, it’s like any other merchandising. Pricing is also positioning. I think there is an argument to be made that says premium pricing works.

Q: I guess so, given that it took $700,000 to develop Bookworm Adventures. But do development costs like that mean startup opportunities in casual gaming are limited?

Mr. Vechey: It’s actually easier now than it was two years ago. It was easy [at first], hard, and now it’s getting easier again. Nothing [in particular] makes a game casual or not. It’s the implementation. The company I want to invest in is three college kids [with great ideas]. Where it’s hard? Knowing you have to set your quality bar high.

Q: Korean companies like NHN are aggressively targeting U.S. gamers with their own web-based games. What are your international plans?

Mr. Roberts: We are putting more money into Asia than anyone in the casual space right now. We’re talking with the Korean companies about working on some initiatives, [but] we’re not going to hitch our horse on any one wagon. We’re working with Real’s new distribution service in China and re-engineering stuff for item-based [transactions]. We have distribution in Japan.

We don’t want to outsource the multiplayer, social, and casual game experience. Doing that right is a research project we’re going to work on internally. We are happy that Zuma and Bejeweled are well known and we’ll continue to evolve what we do [overseas].