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 episode is full of news that aren’t described below, as the games the guys have played get a lot of analysis.
The news, incidentally, includes:
Let us know what you think.
One of the great places to find news on upcoming games is the ESRB‘s website. They typically rate their games and post the ratings on their site to be helpful to concerned citizens looking to purchase upcoming titles.
Of course, the ESRB gets their titles prior to the game release so posting the rating on their website gives away the names and potential timing for soon-to-be game releases. Dates aren’t required for blogs and news sites to glean an idea of a release and the official title name.
Now, the ESRB might be under the same embargo restrictions game review/preview sites are held to, by not posting game ratings until 30 days after it has been rated, says 1up.com.
What’s this mean for bloggers? You’ll need to look harder for dark corners of the Internet to get your rumors and “official” statements.
The patience of PlayStation 3 owners is wearing thin as retailers are reporting a 200% increase in PlayStation 3 trade-ins, usually for Xbox 360 consoles, as well as sales slumps for PSN points cards and fewer multiplatform game sales for PS3.
“In the first week of downtime we did not really see any major change in sales or trades,” says one source, a store manager at a major UK retailer speaking on condition of anonymity. “However from the second week onwards we have seen an increase of over 200 per cent on PS3 consoles being traded in, split almost 50/50 between those trading for cash and those taking a 360 instead.”
Another UK source has reported that the independent retailer had seen a “massive increase” in the volume of PS3s traded in in recent weeks, and has pegged the biggest trade-in demographic as “the hardcore online shooter crowd”, who are logically the group most likely to defect when their online gaming is wiped.
