Strategy for the future

Nov 11, 2009 08:13 GMT  ·  By

Electronic Arts has announced that it has bought Playfish, a company specialized in delivering social casual videogames, for the price of 300 million. The importance of the acquisition is underlined by the fact that on the same day it was announced, Electronic Arts has also posted mounting losses, which came close to 400 million dollars.

Electronic Arts, as a videogame publisher and developer, was not very interested in social gaming, which mostly takes place online, sometime on networks like Facebook, because, despite the big number of players it attracts, it usually fails to actually monetize the time spent in the game. Now, the market seems to be maturing and Electronic Arts sees buying Playfish as the simplest way to establish itself as a leader in the field. A similar strategy of acquisitions has been used to establish a presence in the mobile gaming market.

Barry Cottle, who is the senior vice president and general manager of EA Interactive, set to manage Playfish operations, told Gamasutra that “The social gaming space has just exploded over the last few months... just between April and September of this year, social gaming has gone from 100 million active users to 250 million active users.” The most important games Playfish has developed are Pet Society, Word Challenge and Country Story.

The main strategy for the future appears to be split into two directions. Playfish will seek to take already established Electronic Arts brands, like The Sims, and turn them into social gaming experiences that are easily accessible and take only a small time to play and some of the games the company has developed will be ported to other platforms, which probably means the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3. The owners of Playfish could earn 100 million more from Electronic Arts if their company reaches a number of performance goals until 2011.