EA shouldn't have bought PopCap

Pocket Gamer released funny material in which our colleague John Jordan, commenting on EA’s far from brilliant quarterly results, claims that the gaming giant should have bought a couple of years ago, not PopCap at all.

The story is as follows. For the second fiscal quarter of 2014 (for American companies, the fiscal year may not coincide with the real one), which ended for EA on September 30, the company earned $ 695 million.

Of these, the mobile division accounted for $75 million. It would seem that it is not bad. The problem is that this is exactly the same as the company earned in the same quarter a year ago and 34% less than in the last quarter. 

And this is a wake-up call. 

According to Jordan, the problem is that EA Mobile continues to earn on the same projects as last quarter: on The Simpsons: Tapped Out with a total earnings for the entire existence of the title of $ 100 million (11th place in American grossing at the moment; the game was released more than a year ago) and Real Racing 3 with a MAU of 18 million and a total number of downloads of 70 million (66th place in the American grossing; the game was released this spring).

But Plants vs Zombies 2, which had high hopes, relatively did not go (54th place in the American grossing; launched in August). An excellent casual project with very soft monetization (“for people”, “not milking”) was actively pumped (more than 25 million downloads), but users did not invest money in it (about the reasons here).

So John concludes that EA has put $1.35 billion (it was for this amount that the company was bought in 2011) on the wrong “horse”. I should have bought someone else then. For example, NaturalMotion or Machine Zone. It’s too late now. Their cost has increased significantly. 

A source: pocketgamer.biz