Right now for the ”near term” they’ve got their own IP to leverage, PopCap has a ”pretty robust” pipeline and so they’ll be ”some new stuff coming out.”
”Everything will improve with EA,” said Bart Barden during a GDC Europe Q&A.
”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,” he said. While PopCap certainly has no shortage of original IP in its back catalogue to tap into, they would certainly be looking at EA properties that might flourish.
”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 explained.
”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.”
For now they’ve got plenty of their own work to be doing: ”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.”
What EA IP could PopCap turn into a casual gamer sensation do you think?
