One the surprises success on iPhone has been casual publisher PopCap.

Not that it doesn't make brilliant games, but mobile never seemed to be a priority for the company that sold the mobile licence for its then crown jewel Bejeweled to EA Mobile back in 2001.

Now however with the self-published Bejeweled 2 the best selling iPhone game ever with 3 million paid downloads, and Plants vs Zombies the fastest selling iPhone game ever with 300,000 units sold in 9 days, it's time to talk to director of mobile business development, Andrew Stein, to get an update on what's next for the App Store's most perfect publisher.

Pocket Gamer: How surprised are you to have the best selling and the fastest selling games on iPhone?

Andrew Stein: We're very pleasantly surprised. We expected both games - all the games we've adapted to iPhone and iPod touch in fact - to do reasonably well, given the broad appeal of the games and the devices in question.
Bejeweled continues to surprise us, replicating its success on just about everything short of your toaster. But we're certainly surprised at just how successful Bejeweled 2, Plants vs. Zombies and Peggle have been.

Any news on the sales total for Peggle?

We're not disclosing sales figures for Peggle, but suffice to say it's our second-best selling iPhone/touch game to date - at least for the moment.

Unlike many iPhone developers, you've not released Lite versions of your games. Why?

We're committed to making each adaptation of each of our games as good as they can be, and generally as faithful to the PC/Mac originals as possible. And consumers seem happy to pay $2-5 for our games on iPhone.

Would you consider launching new IP on iPhone first?

Maybe someday we'll bring an all-new game to iPhone first, but our formula of developing games for PC and Mac and then adapting them to other appropriate platforms and devices is working very well.

What are your plans for iPad?

Our development teams are currently looking at the iPad to see what's possible with this new device but as yet, no plans or announcements have been made.

We're definitely intrigued by iPad. PopCap prides itself on making games that will run on any device - even 10-year old PCs. That said, the iPad's capabilities should allow us new opportunities to enhance our games for iPad users.

There's absolutely the possibility of existing games being re-released for the iPad; this doesn't mean they'll be showing up tomorrow, however. We tend to take longer than most game makers in bringing our games to new platforms. But when they do show up we like to think they're as optimised and customised for the platform in question as they can be.

Thanks to Andrew for his time.

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