Electronic Arts to Acquire PopCap Games for $750 Million | Hacker News Reader

Electronic Arts to Acquire PopCap Games for $750 Million

marketwatch.com

48 pointsacrum20 comments

Holy Crap. What's wrong with EA?

Our studio (Treyarch) was acquired for around 5-15mln (not sure the right number), close number for Infinity Ward and other studios (there is report on the net about public numbers).

But $750mln? Isn't the Pandemic acquisition pandemic enough? Who the fuck drives EA?

Apples to oranges. Treyarch at the time was little more than a studio that handled farmed out jobs to translate existing games to other consoles. I don't think they made any original games other than Die by the Sword at the time of acquisition. Compare that to Popcap, who released multiple innovative and original games across a wide variety of platforms. Just because Treyarch is now busy cranking out Call of Duties doesn't mean that the team that was acquired was anywhere near the level of Popcap.

That's my point. We didn't do much at the beginning, yet succeeded later. In contrast, EA has bought lots of expensive studios lately and they did not succeed (and that's okay, as long as you haven't put much money into it).

Btw, singly.com looks awesome, and telehash seems very interesting!

Popcap has games that are brandable. Simply look at the success of Plants Vs Zombies and how well Popcap managed to market it, and realise how much a company like EA could mine out of it.

Plus they have Bejeweled and Zuma that are being exploited well already, but Popcap really doesn't have the talents to market a game like Plants Vs Zombies that's seemingly universally acceptable (I hadn't bought a single popcap game until Plants Vs Zombies and I haven't touched another of their games since).

There's big money in intellectual property, especially when they have products that have yet to be even exploited.

I wish them all the best. Especially to all of the employees!

They shut down Pandemic, but Bioware has been doing pretty well. Mass Effect and Dragon Age have been very successful, and if Star Wars: The Old Republic finds an audience it will probably justify the investment several times over. EA wasn't going to get those properties for free.

How is Zynga supposedly worth over 20 times what PopCap is being bought for? I must be massively underestimating how much people spend on in-game items in * Ville\* Wars. Or really overestimating how many copies of PvZ have been sold (I've bought it twice). And PopCap's revenue model isn't even almost wholly dependent on another companies success.

Question: How old are you? I'm 23 and after entering the social gaming industry as a developer, the numbers are actually incredibly surprising. I'm talking like... several hundred thousand buckaroos a day from a single game, all from the same market of middle aged stay-at-home/desk-job women.

Yep, most people have no idea how much money is in this space right now. Real money. Coming from users.

It's enormous.

buckaroos? How much does that transfer over to USD?

i believe it is 1 to 1

You are massively underestimating. Zynga did $500M revenue in 2010 and PopCap did $100M.

PopCap's games are extremely well known and particularly suited to mobile platforms like phones and tablets. If anything I'd say EA bought them for a steal, they are likely to earn back their buying price and more in only a few years.

Sounds like it's about a 10x revenue buyout. Seems right on the money.

It's mostly hype surrounding anything social right now, especially with a good revenue model. Zynga is worth 4x what EA is and currently worth more than EA and Activision combined.

There is a lot of money in social games, but without getting a lot more users (hard when CityVille is hitting 100 million+) or getting much better conversion rates, Zynga is unlikely to see revenue from social games that matches their current value.

That's how successful the Freemium/Facebook model has been, and describes perfectly where investors think the market is going.

I enjoyed PopCap's announcement: http://www.popcap.com/ea?icid=ea_HP_PLARGE_pc_EN. :)

Much less than the 1+ billion techcrunch reported.

Factoring in possible bonuses EA could pay as much as 1.3 billion. http://techcrunch.com/2011/07/12/confirmed-ea-buys-popcap-ga...

That does not mean much. Those bonus figures seem very far fetched.

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