They were one of the few game studios with games that I could always expect to just work. No worries about weird DRM conflicts, having to be online, losing the CD or whatever having problems after computer upgrades. I could buy the games at the store on impulse with no worries, rather than having to decide if the game looked fun enough to bother spending time researching whether or not it would screw with my system or crash horribly or whatever else.
And now EA owns them...
At this rate, in Plants vs. Zombies XVIII, you will probably be able to connect to people playing Madden 2040 and have them invade your garden as football zombies. Or maybe they'll have merged with more companies by then and you'll have to grow your plants in Farmville first.
Why not take the money and leave to form a new studio? After all the key resource in any game development company are the people, not the IP or existing software..
Most acquisitions have golden handcuff clauses where the shares given in the acquisition vest over time, no? So if they leave early, they don't get all their money. Although maybe the upfront earnout is enough for them to not care.
Well, even if it is Zynga, the talent at Popcap will get a big payout and if Zynga proves to be as stultifying and dull an environment as it seems, then they'll eventually drift away to form new ventures. Not a great deal for gamers, but at least the Popcap folks will get paid. Good for them.
I like Microsoft as the buyer here but here's a more interesting idea: one of the big Android vendors looking for differentiation.
They've had weak results with their ui layers so exclusive apps is the clear next step to take. This could be Amazon, Samsung, Motorola or Sony. Amazon would be my bet.
I think if it was Amazon it would probably be exclusive Amazon Appstore instead of exclusive Amazon Tablet. Maybe exclusive Amazon App Store plus free on Amazon devices.
(1) Amazon's central business is the store, and something like this could be a loss leader to help build the Amazon Appstore vs Google Market.
(2) 90% of the value in these companies would be lost if you lost all phone sales (hence Rovio's short term exclusive on AB2).
Amazon bought Reflexive Entertainment, so there is a precedent of Amazon buying games companies. Afaik they moved a lot of the developers to A2Z Development, but I think they'd leave Popcap largely untouched.
I was curious about tencent. The link gives its market cap as 378.1B - but that's HKD. In USD, it's 48.54B.
That makes more sense, because the largest market cap in the world is 368B (Exxon). 2nd is 303B (PetroChina), 3rd is... Apple, with 295B. I didn't expect that. Apple is the 3rd largest company in the world. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_corporations_by_market_...
It's interesting most people don't expect Apple to be the company acquiring, despite the fact they make a lot popular games for ios and mac. This is could be one of Apple misses if PopCap stop making games for Apple's platform, we know the story of Bungie. Apple is still not fully invested in the game development / gaming community. Apple already missed the opportunity to make Angry Birds it's Mario Brothers for the ios platform.
This will never happen. Ever. It just doesn't make sense if you know anything about Apple and their reluctant acceptance of gaming. Apple is also not about to go around maintaining software for other people's platforms.
> Apple already missed the opportunity to make Angry Birds it's Mario Brothers for the ios platform.
They aren't interested in owning the killer 3rd party apps or games for the platform. If Apple was at all interested in this they would have bought Tweetie, Reeder, and a number of other apps that are ubiquitous on iOS devices.
> This is could be one of Apple misses if PopCap stop making games for Apple's platform, we know the story of Bungie.
Bungie was a totally different situation. PopCap makes its cash from its multi platform strategy, make games that will run on anything and them port them to everything. Bungie desperately wanted Apple to buy them and become a company that it's not.
Frankly releasing Halo for the Mac even with Apple's help would have been a bad idea. It was unfortunate at the time, but everything worked out for the best. Bungie needed a bigger & simpler market for Halo, and Apple didn't need to be tied down by the demands of supporting gaming while they were still in the middle of fleshing out OS X.
Apple purchased Emagic for their 3rd party software and skill. They bought "a killer 3rd party app". They did this because they did not have much in house talent working music production software. Since then Apple philosophy is to develop and hire talent in house, because it's typically much cheaper. But with games they face the same challenge they did when they bought Emagic, they don't have any great gaming talent at Apple. Apple currently promotes Infinity Blade in it's commercial as if it's exclusive to Apple, currently it is but that's not due to contract, Chair can port it if they want to.
> PopCap makes its cash from its multi platform strategy, make games that will run on anything and them port them to everything.
I know that, but that strategy could change with the purchase, that was my point. PopCap's team can get better or than get worse. If the get better and the new owners decided to go exclusive that could be a miss.
I don't think Apple should buy Popcap, I think they should have worked
a long term deal with them. Apple didn't buy Bungie because it's not fully invested in games. Just to illustrate Infinity Blade was mostly developed in a Microsoft os environment.
Everything is a remix, but I'm not comparing game quality, just popularity. One thing is obvious both companies made very popular games on Apple's platform. Once could easily argue that Apple made more money directly from Popcap, there was no Apple app store (with Apple's 30% cut) to sell games back then.
Interesting idea, but they've picked up Playdom already and if you listen to their analyst calls you'll hear that the investment community isn't sold on them owning game/tech assets vs. licensing them.
I would rule out:
- Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Sony, Valve
Just doesn't fit the acquisition profile for those companies IMO. The Popcap guys are smart, and for a billion dollar valuation, the acquire'er would have to have some sizable synergistic advantages afterwards.
Not Valve? I dunno, it seems possible to me, but I think it's probably one of the companies trying to move into casual games, which PopCap are great at, I assume EA.
Part of the reason that they were willing to pay so much was because they have a lot of international money that they couldn't easily bring back into the US. Popcap is in the US so they don't fall under the same issue.
Still excluding the tax savings they still overpaid by all accounts, have a long history of wildly good and bad acquisitions and need to give wp7 every advantage they can. There's no way you can rule Microsoft out at this point they've got to be one of the front runners.
They already seem to have a good WP7 relationship (Bejeweled Live is actually written by them, as opposed to EA Mobile [moderately rare for small platforms], and PvZ just came out last week). Make of that what you will.
Why do you think Valve couldn't afford it? They are a private company and so don't have to release revenue figures, but they make billions in revenue a year.
If Valve bought PopCap then it would be like a Reese's Pieces. Two already great tastes coming together. PopCap is the perfect cultural infusion that could get Steam opened up to a larger (non asian 17 year old male) market.
I worked with Jason Kapalka of PopCap in a previous life. He's a great guy and really passionate about what he does - I'm really glad to see it work out for him (and his colleagues, who are presumably similarly great).
