Plant vs. Zombie founder Readme: from 0 to 100 million dollars

The famous game "Plant vs Zombies" is the work of PopCap software company. The company's revenue this year is expected to reach 100 million dollars.　　But 10 years ago, when it was just set up, it was just a software studio with a dropout and two friends.　　How does it make a leap from 0 to 100 million dollars? PopCap founder John Vechey The Readme I grew up in Wisconsin.　　My father was a steel-making worker, and he was influenced by the hippie movement, who saw friends, family, and women as more important than money, so he never took a full-time job and only worked part-time when he needed the money. My parents divorced when I was very young. I followed my mom, and then a total of 7 stepfather. At that time the family was very poor, I saw others have good food is very envious.　　I have been working part-time in my spare time, so I have little extracurricular activities in my teenage days. I went to Purdue University in 1996. Although I do not have my own computer, but I want to be a programmer, so I took the programming class. The first of all the exams in that class, always a man named Brian Fiete, I asked him if I wanted to make up a game together.　　This is the origin of our first game arc. ARC is a paintball game, put on the internet, attracted a lot of people to play. It took a lot of time to develop the game, and my college GPA was only 1.67, so I dropped out and threw myself into development work. There was an online chat, a man named Jason Kapalka asked to join us, and he became the third founder of PopCap.　　That was 1997. Jason Kapalka persuaded a gaming company to buy an ARC operating license for us at 45000 dollars. That year, I was only 19 years old, and suddenly there was such a sum of money that I felt like a millionaire.　　Later, we sold the arc's ownership to the Sierra Gaming company, and we got 100,000 dollars, and we started our own company in three. Initially, we are only going to develop games for others, never thought of directly to their own brand to the player to launch the game. The first game we developed was rejected by the agents. Then we did the Bejeweled (Diamond fan). The game was born purely by chance, when I went back to my hometown, I saw people playing a card game on the Internet, and it was interesting to send an email to Brian Fiete, who wrote the prototype of the game the next day, and Jason Kapalka found many diamond patterns on the third day,　　The first edition of Bejeweled on the fourth day was formed. We took Bejeweled to find the game site, Yahoo said no interest agent, Microsoft said it can put it on MSN, but the conditions are very harsh, reluctantly, we still accept. As a result, it's very popular on MSN, 60,000 people a day to play, but we pay only 1500 dollars a month。 By the year 2000, the user asked for a downloadable version of Bejeweled, because at that time everyone was dial-up, Internet was expensive, and the phone couldn't get in when the Internet was on. So, I had to convince Yahoo (it also started acting bejeweled) and MSN, continue to provide free online version, while allowing us to launch a more powerful downloadable version of 20 dollars, the profit, we and sales site in half.　　We have a new business model. 2001, bejeweled the first month of online sales, we earned 35000 dollars, the second month 40000 dollars. We know that this situation will not last long, but that money is enough. Brian and I took the money to Argentina on vacation, where we drank every day for 4 months.　　It was not until Yahoo hired us to develop a new game that we returned to the United States. We decided that the games we developed must be very interesting, easy to get started with and attractive to the whole family. Sure enough, the 35 games developed since then have earned money. In 2004, we had 15 employees who were willing to buy US 60 million dollars and we refused. We found David Roberts as CEO and he worked for Apple and Adobe.　　We told him that his job was to do big sales, games, creative things, he didn't care. After David Roberts took office, the first thing to change was to have the same game generate revenue over the long term, not as we have in the past, by constantly developing new games.　　Today, bejeweled income alone accounts for more than 30% of total revenue, because we allow it to run on all platforms: Pc/mac, Xbox, PlayStation, Wii, DS, PalmPilot, IPhone, ipad, and so on. 2006 began, we spent three years, and constantly improve the "Plant vs Zombies" This new game, and finally achieved great success. We always have a belief that it is necessary to make a top game, so as to make a lot of money, if a game is only barely play, then a penny can not earn. (Digging the shell net)