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I guess EA knows a good thing when they see it. Popcap Games (Plants vs. Zombies, Peggle, Bejewled) has just signed with EA Games for a cool $750 million dollars. It looks like EA is trying to invest more into the casual side of gaming that’s been made popular by companies like Zynga (Farmville, Cityville, Villeville) who was also said to be eyeballing Popcap.
In regard to the Popcap buyout EA’s Chief Financial Officer Eric Brown said, “This gives us a much stronger presence in social network games,” — where Zynga just so happens to be king. Not mentioned was the fact that EA’s stock performance hasn’t been doing too well. Its current market cap is running at about $8 billion which is nowhere near as hot as three-year-old Zynga which plans to go public shortly and raise a $1 billion dollar valuation.
All in all, Popcap seems to be the real winner here with EA promising an additional $550 million if PopCap reaches certain performance targets in two years making the total deal hit around $1.3 billion dollars. That could buy a whole ‘lotta brains.
[Via Reuters]
So much for PopCapGames. Whenever EA gets a hold of a franchise like Madden they stagnate it till its boring. Let’s hope PCG retains creative control.
Villeville FTW!
xD
$750M? With possibly $1.3B?! I’m in the wrong industry.
A great era ends today.
Let’s get Insaneaquariam on my Nexus here EA.
well thats better, last time i read it was a meesly 1 million. Thank goodness that was wrong. Popcap is a great game maker and deserve all the money in the world. :)