The mobile gaming world has evolved drastically over the past two decades. With phones transforming from mere devices to take calls and send ‘SMS’ messages to boasting state-of-the-art processors and displays that left early laptops in the dust. For PopCap co-founder Jason Kapalka, a veteran game developer behind classics such as Plants vs Zombies, Peggle and Bejeweled, it’s not just the devices that have evolved, but the audiences have changed too.
Suddenly, web games that were bound to clunky desktop PCs became portable and more accessible, and with that came opportunity. “The thing that’s very different, I guess, about the modern web game audience versus the days of PopCap is that the audience in the 2026 2000, the audience for web games, was again you know like stereotypically bored housewives and secretaries and your grandma and whatnot,” he told FRVR. “And now that’s not true at all [now]. Those people all have phones and if they’re playing mobile games they’re playing them on their phone.”
Kapalka’s most iconic games caused the casual gaming market to explode in popularity, but now that almost everyone is a game, the audience for entirely web-based games has changed. Now, the cliche of a bored housewife isn’t looking to play Bejeweled on his desktop PC, but usually has a game or two on her phone, and the market for web-based games is almost entirely young children, often young children in school.
“The audience for web games now is kids,” he says. “It’s all kids, often pretty young in the, you know, 10 or 12 range, and they’re playing them typically on Chromebooks and sometimes in school. It’s the same kind of technology trying to get stuff to run on the web, which has a surprising number of technical headaches, but a very different audience. We didn’t make games for 10 year olds back at PopCap whereas now, we’re definitely focusing on that kind of demographic.”
Kapalka is now at Blue Wizard and is publishing Wrestle Bros on FRVR. But the studio’s biggest game to date is Shell Shockers, a first-person shooter that runs entirely in-browser. The game designer explains that making a game easy-to-learn and fast to load are the most important factors of web-based game development, and that’s been true ever since the PopCap days.
“If you’re doing a web game you have to make something that people can play in like 10 seconds,” he said. “They’re very demanding in that sense in that, you know, if it takes two minutes to load they’re not going to stick around. If it takes a minute to learn probably they’ll go somewhere else. So there’s a purity to it, I guess.”
While much of the current space of web-based games is currently taken up by the rise of Roblox, Kapalka doesn’t really see the behemoth as a competitor to most web games. They’re largely different audiences, and some players are still looking for unique games that run entirely on-browser, even if those hunting for new games are small children.
