PopCap u-turn on gloomy outlook

PopCap’s Jason Kapalka wants to clarify various comments he made on the future of social gaming.

Last week the casual studio’s creative officer revealed concerns for the future of the social space. Now he feels those claims have been misrepresented.

“When I said the Golden Age of social gaming might be over, I certainly wasn’t predicting a dot-com-style collapse," he told reporters at GamesIndustry.biz.

“It’s been odd to see some of the press running with that angle. It might’ve been more accurate to say the gold rush for social games is ending… where it’s getting harder and harder to put out a shoddy or invasive app and hope to make a quick buck”.

He said this ultimately that means for a better Facebook landscape.

In an interview published last week, he told Develop:

“I think it’s a concern that the whole social game space is getting a little over-heated and potentially becoming a bubble.

“There’s a lot of the same signs here that you saw with the dot-com bust back in 1999, with a lot of investments that seem a bit out of scale.”

At the same time, in an interview with GamesIndustry.biz, he said:

“You’re definitely in the stage right now in social games where there’s a lot of bandwagon jumping, where everyone sees moneymoneymoney and suddenly all these new companies appear… It happened before in mobile, it happened before in casual – in the past it’s tended to signal the beginning of the end.

“Not necessarily of the genre, but of the sort of golden era, where everything was a fresh blue ocean and all that stuff. It’s getting into the era where it’ll be a lot more hard-fought. It’ll be tough. People will make money there, but there’ll be a lot of competition and then margins will shrink and all that sort of stuff. That’s my thought on where we’re heading with social stuff.”