EA officially purchases PopCap studio and Jeff Green for an initial price $750 million with the potential of becoming $1.3 billion if certain milestones and criteria is reached.
The purchase gives EA access to the Bejeweled and Plants vs Zombies IPs along with a huge preexisting network of both games and platforms covering a wide variety of services and consumers. It also reunites the company with their former employee who became the director of social media for PopCap studio.
Quote:
"EA and PopCap are a compelling combination," said EA CEO John Riccitiello. "PopCap's great studio talent and powerful IP add to EA's momentum and accelerate our drive towards a $1 billion digital business. EA's global studio and publishing network will help PopCap rapidly expand their business to more digital devices, more countries, and more channels."
"We picked EA because they have recast their culture around making great digital games," said David Roberts, CEO of PopCap. "By working with EA, we'll scale our games and services to deliver more social, mobile, casual fun to an even bigger, global audience."
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The move is seen as part of EA's stronger push into more of the casual and mobile markets to go along with their current focus on console gaming.
The zombies at PopCap decided to give EA a new greetings card welcoming them as the new bosses and owners of the company.
http://kotaku.com/5820553/electronic...nts-vs-zombies
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Quick News Round-Up:
1) Blizzard announces starting on Season 3, StarCraft II will now have a new region linking setup to increase the pool of players possible for online matches. Europe will no longer be linked to North America while North America now links up with Latin America and Korea expands to include Taiwan.
2) Even though Bioshock's producer, Ken Levine, appeared in the Wii U press conference at E3 along with other developers, Levine stressed that his studio currently isn't involved in any Wii U projects nor has any slated for the near future.
3) Based on a memo from Gamestop, Sony might be removing another feature from the PS3 with the next reversion of the console to only allow HDMI cables to display HD signals while it was unclear if the Component Out connector will be removed or deactivated. The new models will not come with any HD-capable cables and Gamestop is preparing on increase the amount of HDMI cables available in stock before the new model goes on sale.