Tech Cruch is reporting that Electronic Arts is about to acquire casual games giant Popcap Games for a cool $1 billion, which would exceed EA’s market cap by over 13%. If true, this would be EA’s definitive entry into the casual games market, a field they broke into 7 years ago.
Despite consuming a significant chunk of EA’s reserves. buying Popcap would bring them IPs such as Bejeweled, Plants Vs. Zombies, Peggle, Zuma and Bookworm.
We’ll keep an eye on this deal as it happens.
This week’s podcast has no Listener Feedback, and is sort of short because of it. However, in addition to the news items that were on script, there was the surprise news of how much Grand Theft Auto V cost to produce.
This week’s news includes:
This week’s Question of the Week asks if you’ve ever gotten a new version of the console you already owned.
In a slightly odd move, Nintendo has released a WiFi Router in Japan marketed to streamline the process of getting your Wii Online. What?
First, we’re not exactly sure who’s having a problem connecting their Wii to the network, it’s a fairly simple process executed by most popular WiFi routers on the market. We have never seen reports of Linksys, Netgear or the Apple Airport having any issues with connecting Wii consoles to the Internet, like the plans offered by compareyourbusinesscosts.co.uk/, for playing games.
In many gamers minds, the process could be streamlined by removing Wii codes and providing a community style interface on the Wii over creating a hardware platform for network connectivity. It is supposed to serve as a router or as a bridge to connect to a pre-existing router in your network, we’re guessing to provide the “WiFi” access.
Many consumer grade routers, today, have WiFi built into them; what does the Wii‘s router providing which we don’t already have? Maybe special flow-control to understand the Wii protocols better, much like an “Xbox Live Compatible” router may have? Not really sure at this point.
(Thanks, 1up)
For those of you good at math, you might notice that the TD Gaming Podcast is one episode away from a special number. While we have a surprise in store for loyal listeners, there’s still this week’s news to discuss. For starters, the classic Silent Hill 2 is the subject of the Gaming Flashback, even though none of the podcasters have gotten a chance to actually play it.
There’s also some interesting news to discuss, including:
There’s plenty of Reader Feedback, but there’s no Question of the Week, because there’s a special episode coming up. Ooooh, what could it possibly be?
