King’s Candy Crush Saga has ruled the “match-3” game category on mobile for several years now. But that title once belonged to match-3 pioneer PopCap Games and its Bejeweled title. Now, Electronic Arts’ PopCap Games division is shooting for a comeback with Bejeweled Stars.
Bejeweled Stars in action
EA is announcing the return of the Bejeweled franchise today, with the full reimagined game launching as a free-to-play download on the Apple iTunes App Store and Google Play. The title is an important one as Bejeweled kicked off the market for casual games when it debuted in 2001. This audience was more heavily female, and it wasn’t the same sort of player who played hardcore video games. Rather, Bejeweled opened the path for a huge market among non-gamers and paved the game for countless clones.
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Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.
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