EA Making Big Moves Into Social, Mobile Spaces
It has been a busy week for Electronic Arts, with two major acquisitions strengthening the company’s position in both the social and mobile gaming spaces. Not only did they acquire Unicorn Parade developer Ohai (for an as-yet unannounced amount), but they also are in the process of finalizing their $750 million purchase of Plants vs. Zombies developer PopCap.
“It’s the perfect fit,” adds EAi executive VP and GM Barry Cottle.”The culture fits, the respect, the talent — they create killer IP, they’re the Pixar of the game industry… this just makes us a force to be reckoned with.”
As powerful as PopCap is — and on the back of its owned IP, no less — some may wonder why it needed or wanted to sell the company at all. According to Vechey, it’s all down to the company’s priorities:
“We’re focused on making great games and getting them to everyone in the world. Late in the fall, we said, ‘let’s explore options without going public that might get us to our goals faster or better.'”
[PopCap founder John Vechey] agrees with Cottle that the position of best cultural alignment was with EA. “We’re not speaking a different language, because everyone’s talking about games,” he enthuses. “They’ve got this amazing digital publishing… and we are going to get to so many more customers so much quicker, and better. We can get to our objectives a lot faster than we would have independently.”
The Wing Commander CIC has provided links to PopCap’s cheery, cheeky open letter to its fans regarding the acquisition, and also quotes from EA’s official press release.
This news comes on the heels of another interesting announcement from EA, which came out just before the weekend. EA apparently intends to take the Origin digital distribution platform into cross-platform territory, and will even attempt to compete with Apple’s Game Center for iOS. It’s doubtful that EA will be able to get their own app distribution service onto iOS (Apple very jealously guards the App Store’s role…mostly), but one could reasonably see the addition of Origin as an OpenFeint-like service that EA-made iOS games could connect with. Origin would also presumably be what powers the EA Flexion app store, which is rumoured to be coming to Android in the near future.
I’m sad. Maybe the world should just give up and become one giant corporation. For the common good, of course.
One big corporation for the common good? There is something oxymoronic about the idea, no?
Mergers and acquisitions bother my distributist (“the problem with capitalism is not that there are too many capitalists, but too few”) sentiments, though I do realize that they are a normal part of a functional market economy.
Especially in technology-related fields, re-inventing the wheel is not typically a formula for success; partnering with or acquiring someone who already has an excellent back catalogue of wheels (so to speak) is the better move if you are looking to add such things to your own portfolio of offerings.
Overall, EA is making the smart choice by positioning itself still further into the social and mobile gaming spaces, something other companies — like Activision — will probably regret not doing sooner in the coming years. I am not at ease with the move on a philosophical level, but I can comprehend the logic of it even so.