EA Purchases Playfish, Games Might Come to WiiWare, Layoffs Announced
A number of different outlets have reported today that Electronic Arts has completed their bid to buy casual games developer Playfish Games. The studio is responsible for a number of games that appear on Facebook and the iPhone, such as Pet Society and Country Story. The terms of the deal were for $275 million in cash and $25 million for equity retention. There is also another $100 million that is on the table should Playfish meet certain certain milestones for performace through 2011, though the terms of those milestones were not disclosed.
Also mentioned today during an interview Barry Cottle, Senior VP and General Manager of EA Interactive that it would not be out of the realm of possibility for these games to show up on the WiiWare platform in the future.
“These guys have built fantastic franchises that have 20 million+ monthly active users that we can now take to other platforms, and our goal would be to do it in a connected manner. There’s that whole notion of being able to truly play a game regardless of what device you’re playing on.”
While it doesn’t specifically mention WiiWare or Wii as a platform, EA does have a lot of dealings with Nintendo and the WiiWare platform would be the perfect place to put casual offerings like these. It may also do something to help drive people to getting their Wii online, which is something Nintendo President Satoru Iwata is hoping will happen in the future. There are still a large number of Wii users who don’t connect to the internet and these social games could help drive that in the future.
In a bit of sad news also relating to this, EA announced today that they would be laying of 1,500 employees from several different studios. Nothing official has been announced on which studios will be hit, but it’s being rumoured that they include EA Tiburon, Mythic, Redwood Shores and Blackbox. These are names behind some of EA’s biggest franchises. This is all done in an effort to reduce costs by up to $100 million and is expected to be completed by March 31st, 2010.
Source: Kotaku, Game Daily, Joystiq
I heard some people are able to play some playfish games on their ipod, wonder what’ll be next? Inside our cars?