PopCap’s creative director and co-creator of the mammoth casual gaming success Bejeweled, Jason Kapalka, has insisted that firms such as Nintendo are not ‘stealing its thunder’ despite the fact that the huge sales numbers for many casual titles continue to go unrecognised.

Kapalka was responding to a recent report on MCV’s sister site CasualGaming.biz which highlighted the fact that whilst Wii Sports was recently credited as becoming the world’s best selling game having surpassed the 40.5m unit sales mark, casual titles such as Bejeweled have sold nearly ten times this amount.

“Nintendo has been following a parallel path to us for quite a while with the DS and Wii, but I certainly don’t feel they’re getting credited unfairly or that they ‘stole our thunder’ or anything,” Kapalka stated. “I think they’ve been doing the same thing we have, trying to move games back from the hardcore crowd to a more general audience... they’ve just been doing it in the console and handheld space where we’ve been largely focused on the web and PC world.”

CasualGaming.biz has the complete story – click here to take a look.