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.
Microsoft is reporting their European sales are the best they’ve seen in the history of Xbox 360 sales. They’re claiming the sales are double what they were in the 2007 holiday season. They are saying 8-million consoles have been sold to date in Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA).
Microsoft’s fast to push out their press release, probably hoping to overshadow any reports Sony may be releasing for sales numbers. At this point, we’ll have to believe their press release as fact until someone proves it otherwise; Microsoft would hate to be caught in a lie. Unfortunately, NPD figures aren’t collected in Europe so we have to wait for all the other metric gathering companies to release final December 2007 figures.
Sony could, in fact, see a doubling of their sales figures as well, we’ll have to wait and see.
This week’s episode features the crew heavily reminiscing about videogames that first got them excited about the hobby, while Jordan Lund surprisingly takes a contrary opinion that shocks the other podcasters. In addition to videogame news, the Gaming History takes a look at the Nintendo 64DD.
This week’s news includes:
This week’s Question of the Week, “When was the first time that you really got into video games?”
This week’s episode was deliberately delayed because there will be a new day we record: Friday, which means the podcasts will be released on Saturday or Sunday. Therefore, the Dr. Who episode preceding this gave us a little space, and now this podcast will be setting the stage for future episodes.
This week’s news includes:
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