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.
It’s 2016, and the first podcast of the new year is now live. Be warned, there are Star Wars spoilers like Han Solo dying and the entire plot being a rehash of A New Hope, so don’t listen if you don’t want to have your The Force Awakens experience ruined.
This week’s podcast covers the following news:
Question of the Week: “Which game do you really want to play in 2016.”
Although I would have thought different, apparently people are clamoring over the “hype generator” tool called Spore Creature Creator. “The best part is that these creatures will be part of the main game, Spore, as user content will populate a lot of the galaxy in each player’s game,” says Falcon at GameStooge.
Will Wright and the team driving the Spore game is right on target to create the hype needed to send this game into the top game seller. If TheSims woke us up to crazy sales figures, Spore might just beat the demand; imagine creating a tool to help create a world for your company and make money while doing it?
The Creature Creator, in my mind is a genius move to get people interested in the main title and drive pre-sales figures through the roof.
(Thanks, GameStooge)
Gamers around the world have noticed a large trend in the video game industry in the last 15 years, massive growth with massive projects and unbelievable costs, goals and sales. We’ve seen the impossible become achievable in epic projects like World of Warcraft and huge sales figures from Halo 3 but we’ve also seen game titles fall down in a burning wreck.
Each studio tries to beat the next studio with crisp realistic graphics, real time physics engines, life-like explosions all with huge costs. Does it all sound familiar? If you’re a movie buff you’ve probably seen movie studios cranking out the same style of movie, high computer graphic effects with talented high priced actors making longer and longer films.
The only big difference? A game studio hires most of their talent for full time positions and then has to figure out what to do with them when the project ends. Perhaps this explains Microsoft’s effort to remove game studios like Ensemble, Bungie and FASA, it’s all too much to handle when a high budget project ships and time frees up in the studio.
