EA to buy PopCap Games for $1.3B

By Molly McHugh July 12, 2011

Electronic Arts (EA) announced today that it will acquire PopCap Games in a deal that may reach as much as a total of $1.3 billion . Last month, PopCap was rumored to have a mystery buyer that was offering somewhere around $1 billion. Given EA’s recent forays into social gaming, the deal doesn’t come as a huge surprise.

PopCap is behind popular games Plants vs. Zombies, Peggle, Zuma, and Bejeweled. ‘We picked EA because they have recast their culture around making great digital games,” CEO David Roberts said in a statement today. “By working with EA, we’ll scale our games and services to deliver more social, mobile, casual fun to an even bigger, global audience.”

The rise of social gaming has been good to PopCap, which integrates with Facebook, RenRen, Google, as well as Android and iOS devices. And EA has been keeping tabs on the industry: The developer has been traditionally affiliated with console and PC gaming up until recently, when it’s made several acquisitions to establish itself in the social gaming market. EA acquired both Playfish and Angry Birds publisher Chillingo recently, as well as signed a five year deal with Facebook in late 2010.

Adding PopCap Games to this list is another big step for EA’s social gaming division. It’s becoming more and more of a serious competitor in the social and casual gaming market, likely with intentions of challenging Zynga, which continues to dominate. According to EA’s investor statements, PopCap will also help its presence with gamers in Asia, as well as via mobile platforms.

Topics

Former Digital Trends Contributor

Before coming to Digital Trends, Molly worked as a freelance writer, occasional photographer, and general technical lackey…

Gaming

Sea of Thieves beginner’s guide: 16 tips for new pirates

sea of thieves how to play solo sanctuaryoutpost 2

Cooperative piracy simulator Sea of Thieves is a game that drops players right off the plank and into the deep end of the ocean as soon as they start it up. You're left to figure out how to do almost everything alone or with a crew of friends. All of it is picked up through experience as you play, which is part of what makes Sea of Thieves interesting. There are tons of little nuances and best practices, however, that you need to become an effective pirate.

If you want to win sea battles, escape plunderers, gather treasure, and generally be the best pirate on the Sea of Thieves, there is a lot to learn. Luckily, these tips will make you an effective sailor, a deft brawler, and a smart privateer when you join up with a crew. Going it alone has its perks as well, so check out our tips for your lone pirate voyages.
Start with the tutorial mission

Gaming

How to hack in Fallout 4

A computer terminal in Fallout 4.

No matter what perks or skills your character has in Fallout 4, hacking will always come down to your ability as a player. There's no way to cheat the system here, and if you don't grasp what the game is asking you to do, you're mostly out of luck. Terminals will hide great loot behind their cryptic puzzles, as well as allow you to take over certain controls to turn your enemy's security against them. Some have very interesting logs about certain characters or events for all you lore junkies out there. Hacking has tons of uses, so let's brush up on your computer skills and give you a refresher on how to hack in Fallout 4.
How to hack in Fallout 4
When you first interact with a terminal to hack in Fallout 4, it will be a little overwhelming. As long as you have a high enough hacking skill to attempt a hack, you can go right into the minigame.

The basic idea of hacking is to find words hidden in that jumble of letters and symbols. Your goal is to find the correct word to crack the terminal before you run out of attempts. Once you find any word and select it, the terminal will tell you how close that word is to the correct one based on how many letters it has in the same space as the answer in the form of a likeness rating. The higher the rating, the more letters it has in common. It is somewhat similar to Wordle, only you don't type in the words yourself.

Gaming

Best PS5 SSD deals: Add more storage to your PS5 from $120

A 2TB WD Black

When the PlayStation 5 was originally released, it had the option to expand its internal memory, which was quite small at the time at a little under 900GBs. Of course, the issue is that there weren't any SSDs that worked on the new standard the PS5 was using, so even if you wanted to upgrade, you couldn't. Luckily, since then, there have been a lot of great SSDs for the PS5 that have been released, and upgrading its storage is pretty easy and can be done by pretty much anybody, provided they have a screwdriver. So, whether you picked up a PS5 from one of the PS5 deals or already have a PS5 and want to upgrade, be sure to check out the SSDs that will work great for your PS5 below.
Our favorite PS5 SSD deal

It wasn't that long ago that you'd have to pay well over $100 to get an SSD for your PS5, and often, it'd be slower than the pricier alternatives. These days, you can buy a Samsung 980 Pro 1TB SSD with heatsink for just $120 from Best Buy, thereby saving $45 off the regular price of $165. The SSD offers speedy performance while also having its own nickel-coated high-end controller to help deliver effective thermal control. It means it won't overheat and performance won't be compromised. Being a PCIe Gen 4 SSD, you get twice the data transfer speed of PCIe Gen 3 which is useful. Offering maximum read speeds of 7,000 megabytes per second, it's a good upgrade to go alongside your existing hard drive with 1TB offering plenty of extra space at a shrewd price.