14 DAY TRIAL // PopCap has announced having released a new version of its popular Zuma casual game, which uses the Connect technology created by Facebook in order to introduce a variety of social elements to the game. Renamed Zuma Web Connect, the videogame will allow players to send to Facebook medals and other statistics related to their performance in order to show them off to other players.
This is not the first PopCap game to get integrated with the popular social networking platform. For the last six months, Facebook players have been able to play something called Bejeweled Blitz, which condenses the entire game experience in just one minute. PopCap is saying that as many as 5 million people played the game during this period.
Gareth Davis, who is the Facebook platform manager at PopCap, told Gamasutra that “We're seeing the use of the Facebook social graph, and the ability to publish stories really driving usage of that traditional casual game,” before emphasizing the importance of the social aspect by saying that “now lots of people here are playing it when they weren't playing it before because it's now a social game.”
As far as numbers go, Zuma is the second best selling title ever released by PopCap, behind the ubiquitous Bejeweled. Since its initial release in 2003 and across all platforms, Zuma has sold about 17 million times. The game is still being played and it probably won't take long for PopCap to integrate it with World of Warcraft, as it recently did with Peggle.
Not long ago, PopCap also made a foray in the tower defense genre, releasing Plants vs. Zombies, a videogame that tasks the player with defending their house against a wide variety of zombies (including Michael Jackson) by planting stuff on their front lawn, from pea shooter to carnivorous plants.