EA to buy PopCap for $750 million!

The rather large video game company EA has announced it is purchasing PopCap Games, a ‘casual game outfit’ for $750 million, which sees a large shift to a digital distribution of games.

EA has been one of the major forces in the gaming industry typically selling its games as a boxed product on a shelf and sometimes charging up and over £40 for 1 games. Of course, as we are all aware, recent developments in the technology industry, more precisely the rise of social and mobile technology, have changed gaming, and now there is no real need for the ‘boxed model’.

This has led to the rise of ‘casual gaming’ which are the games you usually find in the App store, they are easy to play and try to get you hooked for a short period of time, but they never expect you to play them for long. Popular examples of this include Angry Birds, and dare I say, Farmville on Facebook.

PopCap whos main titles include Bejeweled and Plants vs Zombies are aimed very much at the mobile market, and looking back to 2009 where EA purchased Playfish – a social game developer- we see that EA is trying to cover all bases as such.

“EA and PopCap are a compelling combination,” said EA CEO John Riccitiello. “PopCap’s great studio talent and powerful IP add to EA’s momentum and accelerate our drive towards a $1 billion digital business. EA’s global studio and publishing network will help PopCap rapidly expand their business to more digital devices, more countries, and more channels.“