Bejeweled Deluxe Free for Mother's Day

Just in time for Mother's Day, PopCap Games has announced that it is giving its popular game Bejeweled Deluxe for free to Moms all over the world.

A Gift for ALL Moms From PopCap Games® - Bejeweled® Deluxe FREE

Most Popular "Casual" Video Game of the 21st Century Available at No Cost This Mother's Day

SEATTLE, Washington – May 8, 2007 — PopCap Games®, the leading developer and publisher of casual games, today announced that will give all subscribers to its free monthly e-newsletter one copy of Bejeweled® Deluxe, the biggest-selling casual game of the past six years, at no cost. To obtain a free copy that can be presented to one’s mother or grandmother, consumers simply sign up to receive The Fizz, PopCap’s monthly digital newsletter, via the link on the company’s homepage (www.popcap.com). Beginning tomorrow and continuing through May 23, 2007, existing and new subscribers to The Fizz will receive an email with a special link and unique registration code for a free copy of the full retail version of Bejeweled Deluxe, which must be redeemed by May 30, 2007. Presenting that as a gift to mom is as simple as forwarding the email or printing out the salient information and including it in a card.

The Bejeweled franchise has sold more than 10 million units and consumed approximately 2 billion hours of leisure time, and company surveys peg the Bejeweled user base as being 75% female and 89% age 30 or older. 44.6% of PopCap’s customer base has at least one child, which equates to nearly 100 million downloads of PopCap’s games by parents over the past six years. Bejeweled Deluxe carries a suggested retail price of US$14.95 and is available at all major games portals as well as at retail chains including Wal-Mart, Target and CostCo.

“Moms, grandmothers, and women in general have supported PopCap in many significant ways since we founded the company in 2000,” noted Jason Kapalka, co-founder and Chief Creative Officer at PopCap. “We wanted to repay that generosity in some fashion, and giving away free copies of the game that launched our success seemed like a fun way to do that.”

In the earliest days of the company, PopCap’s founders used their own moms as “sounding boards” for games in development. “We would set our moms down in front of PCs with early-stage versions of games such as Bejeweled, and just leave them there for awhile,” recalled John Vechey, another of PopCap’s co-founders. “If they were still playing when we returned, we knew we were headed in the right direction with a game that could appeal to a very wide audience.” PopCap continues to use mothers and grandmothers in the testing stages with each of its games, and more than two-thirds of the company’s Beta Test Group is comprised of adult female consumers.

“A free copy of Bejeweled for Mother’s Day sounds wonderful to me,” said Michele Lewis, a busy mother of four who home-schools all of her children, age 9 to 13. “From Bookworm to Zuma, I love playing the PopCap games – either with my children or by myself when I find those precious few minutes of ‘me time’!”