As speculated last month, EA has acquired PopCap Games for $750M. PopCap, best known for its wildly popular Plants vs Zombies, is EA’s largest acquisition ever. The company responsible for Bejeweled will be essential to their new casual genre market.
EA has also recently acquired Facebook developer Playfish as well as iPod developers Chillingo and Firemint. All of this hints at a new marketing turn towards the highly profitable mobile and social game market.
Combine these events with EA’s Origins service, and it looks like they want more than just a slice of the market. They want the whole pie. But what does this mean for Steam fans? The direct result is that EA may add its own copy protection to PopCap games. Fans may have to sign into Steam and then again into EA servers to play Plants vs Zombies for a few hours.
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