Jul 14, 2011 16:31 GMT  ·  By

After yesterday's surprising news that Electronic Arts has acquired Bejeweled and Plants versus Zombies developer PopCap, new rumors have appeared, saying that Facebook giant Zynga also made a bid for the casual games developer.

PopCap made a name for itself by releasing dozens of high-quality and extremely addictive casual games, from Bejeweled to Zuma or Plants versus Zombies, and was rumored to go public soon enough.

Now, the studio was acquired by large scale publisher Electronic Arts, which paid around $750 million for it.

A new report indicates, however, that PopCap was extremely close to accepting an offer from Zynga, the company behind massively successful Facebook games like FarmVille, CityVille or Empires and Allies.

According to Forbes, Zynga made a $1 billion offer to PopCap, but was turned down because Electronic Arts offered $750 million and promised that, if the developer reaches certain milestones in the next two years, an additional $550 million could be offered, much more than Zynga could have paid.

Representatives from PopCap and Electronic Arts talked with Industry Gamers about Zynga and confessed that while it is a very successful company, it's relying too much on Facebook.

"We're playing a much bigger game [than Zynga]. We're going after the $40 billion dollar digital market, where Facebook is just a segment. We're diversifying ourselves and putting ourselves in a better position to go after that. If you look at the way we're set up, our digital revenues range across MMOs, free-to-play, social, mobile, DLC, and PopCap now adds greater franchises. At the end of the day, Facebook is just one segment," said EA Executive Vice President Barry Cottle.

PopCap founder John Vechey also expressed his views on Zynga and highlighted that only EA, with its well-developed publishing network, could make PopCap games even more successful.

"What's relevant to us is we're trying to get to every single person in the world playing a PopCap game. We can now take advantage of the digital publishing strength of EA to help us get there. I don't think of this as an answer to Zynga. It's about making great games and getting them to a lot more people and EA's the perfect partner for that," he remarked.

What do you think? Is it better that EA acquired PopCap or should the developer accepted the offer from Zynga? Share your thoughts below.