Following last’s year expansion into merchandise including toys, underwear (!), and more, EA’s PopCap is now taking its popular “Plants vs. Zombies” title to the printed (and e-inked) page. Penguin Children’s has acquired the physical and e-book publishing rights to the game, in a three-year deal. → Read More
Electronic Arts is laying off staffers at its Montreal office in another round of job cuts. The news comes less than two weeks after CEO John Riccitiello resigned, citing the company’s financial underperformance. → Read More
SimCity is making its way to Mac, as promised, but now EA has put a specific date on when that will happen. The city-building simulator will arrive on OS X June 11, EA revealed in a press release today, at which time those who have purchased the game for PC on either Origin or as a physical boxed copy will be able to download Mac-compatible version, too. → Read More
Sim City, EA’s beleaguered sim game that, for a time, was probably the most cursed title in the blogosphere, now allows players to place Nissan-branded® solar® recharging® stations® in their cities®. The cha®ging stations add a boost of happiness® to surrounding homes and businesses. You can download it here for free. (All Rights Reserved, While Supplies Last) → Read More
Electronic Arts’ SimCity was easily the most anticipated game of the season, but its launch was an unmitigated disaster because the DRM solution Electronic Arts and Maxis dreamt up means users have to always be online if they want to play. Sadly, EA’s servers weren’t up to the task and most players were either unable to connect or got kicked out of the game after a while. Today… → Read More
EA’s anticipated SimCity launch has officially become a cavalcade of fail. Amazon is temporarily suspending sales of digital copies of the game in the face of massive negative buyer feedback, with the electronic title managing to accrue an overall rating of one star on the retailer’s site. This comes after EA disabled certain features to try to ease launch woes, and after it delayed the European… → Read More
According to InsideSocialGames, Zynga and EA have settled their legal dispute over the former’s alleged copying of EA’s popular game “The Sims.” It was clear to many that once Zynga started teasing “The Ville,” it took some major elements from EA’s classic. A source has told TechCrunch that no money has exchanged hands as part of the settlement. At the… → Read More
Electronic Arts has just reported lower-than-expected third-quarter fiscal year 2013 earnings today, missing on revenue but just squeaking out a win on EPS. Revenue came in at $1.18 billion for the quarter, down from $1.6 billion in the same quarter last year, while non-GAAP diluted EPS was $0.57. Non-GAAP net income was $176 million from the quarter, down from $334 million in Q3 2011. → Read More
Electronic Arts continues to beef up its cloud-based gaming offerings. Today it was announced that it is buying ESN, developers of the Planet web-based games framework, for an undisclosed sum. The two companies had already been working together, namely on Battlelog, an online social-web component for EA’s Battlefield 3. The news was announced on ESN’s blog. → Read More
Electronic Arts announced today that it is merging two top mobile game studios, IronMonkey and Firemint, which will fittingly combine to create a new company, called Firemonkeys. (All parties are awarded 50 points for the awesome portmanteau.)
For those unfamiliar, IronMonkey is probably best known for adapting popular EA titles to mobile, like Mass Effect Infiltrator, Dead Space, and The Sims… → Read More
Electronic Arts today announced that they are joining a group of businesses opposing DOMA (Defense of Marriage Act).
In case you aren’t familiar with it, the Defense of Marriage Act is a federal law that defines marriage as the union of one man and one woman. The law also states that no U.S. state or political subdivision is required to recognize a same-sex marriage treated as a marriage in… → Read More
Less than a year after the debut of gaming on Google’s social platform, Google+, two game developers are pulling their titles. Bejeweled Blitz, a popular game owned by Electronic Arts‘ Pop Cap divsion, and several titles from Wooga, the maker of games for children, will no longer be available on the Google+ social network. → Read More
Over the last several months, the biggest Western social gaming companies have been making moves, and attracting attention as a result. Japanese gaming giant GREE bought Funzio for $210 million to help it move into Western markets, and Zynga grabbed Draw Something creator OMGPOP for $183 million. Meanwhile, European social gaming companies, like Sweden’s King.com and Germany’s wooga have been… → Read More
EA’s big shift toward treating games as services instead of packaged goods is going to mean restructuring this year.
Chief executive John Riccitiello said in today’s earnings call that there will be some layoffs as the company increases production of online, mobile, and social games. While EA beat earnings estimates for the quarter ending in March, its shares fell in after-hours trading by as… → Read More
Want a zombie on your underwear? Good, because soon, you will have that opportunity. Today, there comes more proof that mobile gaming is the entertainment franchise opp of the future as EA-owned PopCap, makers of Plants vs. Zombies and the “Bejeweled” series of games, announced a number of new partnership deals that will see its game brands turned into merchandise – much like Rovio’s Angry Birds… → Read More
So, there’s been some hubbub around Electronic Arts over the last few days, as the company ramps up for the release of its third quarter earnings on February 1st. Yesterday, EA’s stock closed at $17.54 per share, which, in context, meant that the gaming goliath’s stock was down 30 percent since hitting its 52-week high in early November. This drop was mostly due to the collective shock relating to… → Read More
Back in August, social game developer Kixeye raised $18 million in series C financing, and added Zynga Andrew Trader to its Board of Directors. And today the self-proclaimed “largest maker of online strategy combat games” has announced the addition of another ex-Zynga exec into the fold.
Brandon Barber will be joining Kixeye as the SVP of Marketing, where he will report directly to Chairman… → Read More
After churning out a parade of sequels to all of their flagship games, has EA finally learned its lesson? Last month, EA CEO John Riccitiello said that his company is taking dead aim at Zynga, implying that perhaps the company understands what’s at stake, and is determined to be just as much of a player in digital games as it has been on consoles.
EA’s acquisition of PopCap Games, the makers of… → Read More
The last ten years have been kind to game publishers. The mainstreamification of console gaming has led to enormous sales numbers, budgets rivaling Hollywood’s, and an arms race between the majors to create the next big game. But while EA and its ilk were buying up development houses, expanding like crazy, and having franchise-measuring contests with each other, an unperceived menace was growing… → Read More
As we initially reported a few weeks ago, EA has acquired PopCap Games. The acquisition price is $650 million plus $100 million stock and a multi-year earn-out. The total acquisition price is as much as $1.3 billion.
PopCap Games is the company behind such hits as Plants vs Zombies, Zuma and Bejeweled. PopCap games have been installed 150 million times worldwide. Last year, approximately 80% of… → Read More
Following up on our story earlier this evening that PopCap Games is in late stage acquisition discussions for a sum of over $1 billion — we’ve now heard from two sources that the buyer is Electronic Arts.
The high price of the deal ($1+ billion) means that this would be a huge bet for EA — we’re talking over 13% of the company’s market cap. But we’re hearing that this is a Hail Mary pass… → Read More
Nordeus made quite a stir when their social football game, Top Eleven, beating gaming giant EA’s FIFA Superstars for the most monthly players, attracting over 2.8 million users.
The interesting thing about this Belgrade, Serbia-based startup, however, isn’t the number of users: they’ve had more than 700,000 active users for quite some time now, 200,000 more than FIFA for Facebook. It’s that… → Read More
If you were hoping to pick up a copy of Crysis 2 on Steam, you’re out of luck. The game is no longer available on Valve’s download service, though it was not (strictly speaking) pulled by EA. While EA has explained in a statement that the title is simply incompatible with “a set of business terms” “imposed” by Steam, the language and context suggest that it was action by inaction — they… → Read More
Electronic Arts is today debuting Origin, a direct-to-consumer gaming platform, as first reported by the Wall Street Journal. According to the placeholder website, expect Origin to go live around 9 AM Pacific time.
The platform will enable gamers to discover, buy and download more than 150 games from EA at its debut, with exclusive limited edition copies of EA games like Battlefield 3 and FIFA… → Read More
Electronic Arts is today debuting Origin, a direct-to-consumer gaming platform, as first reported by the Wall Street Journal. According to the placeholder website, expect Origin to go live around 9 AM Pacific time.
The platform will enable gamers to discover, buy and download more than 150 games from EA at its debut, with exclusive limited edition copies of EA games like Battlefield 3 and FIFA… → Read More
We’re continuing to highlight some of our favorite moments from the many hours of backstage content live-streamed during Disrupt last week. One of my favorite sit-downs was with Bing Gordon, general partner of Kleiner Perkins.
A fireside chat with Gordon is always…unique. We didn’t get poetry this time, but we had a fascinating talk about how the cost of entertainment has collapsed from $1 an… → Read More
Electronic Arts (EA) has acquired Firemint, a privately held mobile development studio based in Melbourne, Australia. Firemint is the 60-people strong company behind games like Flight Control (see video below) and Real Racing.
EA says the deal is not material to the company, overall. Terms of the acquisition, which is expected to close within four weeks, were not disclosed. → Read More
Fans will be able to help decide who will be the Madden NFL 12 cover athlete. EA has teamed up with ESPN, creating a bracket system to narrow down a field of 32 players (one player from each team) to one lucky gentleman. Don’t mention the Madden curse. → Read More
Did EA ship the PC version of Dragon Age II with SecuROM DRM without telling anyone? It certainly looks that way. Reclaim Your Game’s analysis of the DVD (ie non-Steam) version of the PC game found that it does, in fact, contain SecurROM, and despite the fact that EA has a 28-page (!) EULA nowhere in there—nor anywhere else—is SecuROM mentioned. Furthermore, once installed, you can’t… → Read More
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