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PopCap chief executive Dave Roberts says the past six months have been 'pretty damn crazy' for the company. Photograph: Lincoln Potter/Samaya LLC/Lincoln PotterOne of the biggest game industry stories this year has centred around the acquisition of one of casual gaming's leading lights, PopCap, by Electronic Arts for the hefty sum of $750m (£457m).
While the benefits of the sale from EA's perspective are easy to work out – it extends the company's reach on both social network and smartphone gaming platforms, and increases its talent-base significantly – PopCap's motives for the sale have been difficult to pin down.
We spoke to PopCap chief executive Dave Roberts to find out what motivated the deal and what effects it will have on the company.
How were the past six months?
It was certainly crazy. I don't know if it was the craziest six months of my life, but it was pretty damn crazy.
Can you talk me through the decision process that led to PopCap being acquired by Electronic Arts?
Well, we were working with some bankers on the deal. They were taking us through the whole thing – which wasn't a traditional banking process. At the same time we were spending a lot of energy and time looking at going the IPO route on this and doing a lot of work on that. So, on the one hand I was involved in that, and on the other, I was meeting with a lot of companies who could potentially acquire us, so, yeah, there was a lot on my plate during that time.
It was kind of like speed dating – although I've never done speed dating. For us, there were a lot of quick 'Hi, how are you' meetings. EA was a good fit for us, though. I think both companies remembered each other from a couple of years ago when we first took a good look at each other's inner workings – it was easy to think that everything was static, when in fact, the truth was both companies had changed a lot over that time.
A lot of it was about rediscovering, for us, that EA actually cared about games. That was an eye-opener for me; I mean I know John Riccitiello's been saying it for a long time, but I've heard that sort of thing before. Just because a CEO is saying it doesn't make it so. But then you walk through the halls of EA and see people who are genuinely excited about games.
Number 1 hit: Bejeweled, PopCap's first runaway success They also like us from a product-personal perspective. They genuinely have affection our games; their interest in us wasn't because they saw as filling a market niche. With Riccitiello's vision for EA, games do come first and this multi-platform future for all games is kind of where we at PopCap were heading anyway. We share a common vision with them.
There's now a lot more we can do with our games – and I think we've just scratched the surface of what we're capable of.
What will the deal change at PopCap?
Well, PopCap's been changing every single year for the last 10 years, but hopefully, we'll keep the essence of what we do here. One of the things I like about EA – and I don't think this was true of them a few years ago – is that they care about games very passionately. I think they lost that for a while. The EA of four years ago was the EA that was arrogant and didn't really give a shit about games. At some point though, and I personally didn't even notice this about EA until around last year, but things had changed. EA was different; people were actually excited about their jobs again, and I don't think that had happened in a while.
Every indication is, that EA like us as we are. They've not really proven to be very good at making casual content, so there's no reason why they'd want to mess with what we have here.
We certainly look at it as an opportunity to take some of the things that we've tried to do better on a bigger scale – like massive porting efforts, for example – that we've never been quite as good as EA at doing. We could only do that sort of stuff on a PopCap scale. Teaming up with EA to do that stuff is going to make our lives so much easier; a lot of our game guys will have space and time to work on games and they won't have to spend vast amounts of time on porting efforts, say.
Peggle opened the door to PopCap's hardcore success through Steam So was the main objective in the deal to allow PopCap to refocus its creative talent?
Well, that's one objective, sure. We're a relatively small company after all. I mean, for example, we've got a team in Dublin right now that's working on a social media game, but that's also the team we have that does ports to Android. Also, if we get a Sony Ericsson deal, we have to go off and buy 60 handsets to work on.
Look, no individual task is that hard, but you'd have a situation where we'd have designers, artists and engineers that could be working on a social game, and they're doing other things instead of that. Now, we can move that sort of work off to other parts of the EA organisation that do that stuff very well. The good news is that EA have set it all up so we get to choose which parts of our organisation and workload that we want to integrate. There's no big EA mandate that dictates that we have to do things their way.
Their attitude is more: 'Look, here's the stuff our organisation can do. Let us know what you want and we'll figure it all out.'
Well, that's how it's been so far. We haven't closed the deal yet, so ask me in six months! But we're pretty excited about it. We really see this as an opportunity to be a bigger company, hopefully without losing what's special about what we do here.
So was the other major objective to grow PopCap as a company?
Well, we've always been about creating this enduring legacy for our brands. We want our games to rank up there with games like Monopoly and Scrabble, regardless of the fact that they're video games. People have favourite games but a many of them aren't video games and we really want to change that. Now, with the consumer reach that EA's got, we're better positioned for that. We knew we could have probably done it on our own, but it would have taken a lot a longer. With EA, we can accelerate that process by quite a large number of years, because a relationship with them gives us access to a lot more resources.
Some of its things, like Playfish's publishing platform, which can accelerate our social media games development, or Origin, which is this huge client database which will help us reach more gamers.
So we've got more available. We don't have all the answers yet on what we're going to do with all of it, but we're excited that we have the opportunity to use it.
You sound like you're still figuring it out as you go…
Yeah, well, that's just it; the biggest challenge for a company our size is that there are so many things that we could do. The danger is that we don't make sure we know what the first things we should go after are. We're going to have to be a little bit careful; it's easy to try a thousand things at once and do none of them. We've got to be a bit judicious about things and take deliberation on it.
Look, there are a lot of questions we still have – we haven't closed the deal yet – and there's the potential for a lot of angst that people have when there's this much change, so we know we have a lot still to work through.
You've said that there's a lot that will change at PopCap – as has been happening over the last 10 years – but surely there are fundamentals here that won't be changed?
Well they shouldn't be. Unless, of course, we decided we wanted to change them. Look, five years ago we were a download gaming company. Now we're a social media games company and a smartphone games company. That's what we're know for now, and that's a pretty big change, right? It's the biggest change that I think we've had at PopCap – certainly in the time I've been here.
We've had to really think about games differently. With social games, I really have to credit Jason [Kapalka, founder and chief creative officer] and some of the other guys at the studio for dragging some of the old timers we've had here, kicking and screaming sometimes, towards that genre. Once they got it, though, they really realised that all social games were not evil and they were actually a really cool way to engage users in ways we never thought of before. Once that happened, the whole landscape here changed.
I think we're on this dawn of new social games. We haven't seen the best of what that platform has to offer yet – not just from PopCap but from anyone. We want to change the way people look at social gaming and I'm sure other folks are working on the same thing. Take the new Sims social stuff – I haven't seen it myself yet, but I've heard it's supposed to be amazing. I don't think you're going to be seeing much more, cloney, spam-your-friends games that we've seen on Facebook in the past. I think you're going to see a lot of innovation there and that's only a good thing.
Plants vs Zombie proved a massive crossover hit for both casual and core audiences So do you think that we're going to see fewer games on social platforms that put a premium on monetisation?
Well, it depends on what you care about. You can go overboard with monetisation on any platform. You can take any of the free-to-play models too far and I think doing that too much can put a blemish on the industry. I think that this actually hurt social games very early on, even some of the ones like FarmVille, which I think was very spammy at first. But they've gotten huge; ask FarmVille players now if they like FarmVille, and they do. It's easy for us in the core gaming crowd to say that it's not even a game, but the truth is, FarmVille has tens of millions of people who play it and love it and you can't argue with that!
Do you think that the core market developers resist making social media games because they see how much money they make and they start getting worried that this is the sort of game that publishers and developers will start to focus more on making, because that's where the money is?
I think that's a part of it, sure. But then there's another part of it that it's because it's the unknown. Game designers are a fickle breed and they kind of like things to stay the way they are. It's hard for things to change sometimes – look, we've struggled with it. It's hard to make a game with the right balance; which is fun, and that you can monetise while having it still be engaging. Making a game which is a one-time fee is a much easier challenge than making any freemium game model work.
I've seen a lot of bad freemium models out there where they give you two levels and then expect you to pay for it – and the two levels aren't very good. There may be an interesting game in there, but you'll never know, because the makers tried to make you pay for it too fast!
So, I guess developers have always had game balance issues, and now we've got a new dimension for game balancing and I think that's daunting. It's a whole new skill set and evidenced by some of the stuff I've seen out there, a lot of people aren't very good at it.
I think we'll come around, though. People are learning how to make better social games. We take an approach here where we try to lead with the fun part and then dial up the monetization part. We've probably left money on the table somewhere, but ultimately we've kept our customers happy and we've preserved our reputation and, frankly, that's the most important thing for us. We're in for the long run. It's Facebook today, but it might Google+ in a year and it could be something completely different in three years.
Do you have any developers looking at making games for Google+?
I don't know if I'd be allowed to say so if we did!
