PopCap: Leveraging EA IP ‘would make sense’

Speaking at GDC Europe PopCap’s director of online business Bart Barden has said the casual gaming company may look to work with EA’s established IP in the wake of the buyout by the publisher.

"Everything will improve with EA," said Barnden at the Q&A session following his talk on localisation and ‘regionalisation’.

"We’ll have so much more data. We’ll have more users to comb against, we will know how to make cross-promotions more effective, we’ll have more understanding of what users do across multiple games, and we’ll be able to do things like make better lifetime value calculations and better unduplicated reach calculations. And we’ll have more ‘Facebook IDs’, if you will, in our cache."

Barden went on to say that while PopCap has made a success out of creating it’s own IP for 10 years, it may work on cross-branding with existing EA IP.

"I think there are certain aspects of the products that would really make sense in that way; things like mini games or pieces of games, or maybe small features that sit on top of some of the core games," he said, later adding: "I do see a lot of synergies for, probably, cross promotion. I think it’s about getting the PopCap people excited about EA’s social games and visa versa. There’s probably the biggest bang for the buck there, at least in the near term."

Bardon also confirmed that PopCap still has plenty of it’s own IP to work on in the coming months.

"In the near term we have some other IP. Our pipeline for PopCap’s social games is pretty robust and there’ll be some new stuff coming out. It’s a lot of our own stuff that at least for now we’ve got to get out."

PopCap has worked on licensed IP in the past. There was a Half-Life 2 edition of Peggle, packaged with the Window’s version of The Orange Box and released on Valve’s Steam, and there have even been a small number of licensed deals realised as products sold on PopCap.com for a brief amount of time.