Bejeweled 3 hitting all major platforms this year

PopCap's Bejeweled series is one of the publisher's biggest, with the franchise selling some 50 million units life-to-date. The series grew in December, when the well-received Bejeweled 3 shipped for the PC. Now, that game is scheduled to arrive for a much broader audience by the end of the year.

PopCap today sent word that Bejeweled 3 will ship for the Xbox 360, Xbox Live Arcade, PlayStation 3, PlayStation Network, and Nintendo DS during Q4 2011. According to PopCap, this marks the first time a Bejeweled game has shipped for all "top video game platforms" simultaneously.

The Bejeweled franchise--which originated in 2000--is one of the top 10 video game franchises of all time, according to PopCap. Further, the publisher claims that 8 billion hours have been spent playing Bejeweled games and that a game in the series is sold every 4.3 seconds.

As for Bejeweled 3, the game's simple play mechanics see players presented with a field of gems, with the goal of swapping the place of two adjacent baubles to form a sequence of three or more and clear them from the board. The game awards bonus points and score multipliers for extended sequences.