Why did PopCap choose EA? Because it really cares about games

Suitors have been lining up to acquire PopCap since the turn of the year, but earlier this month EA was named as the successful buyer in a $750m deal. But why EA?

EA actually cared about games. That was an eye-opener for me,” PopCap CEO Dave Roberts told The Guardian.

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.

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.”

Roberts also reflected on the process he undertook to select a buyer for the company.

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,” he added.

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 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.”