PopCap just announced a sequel to Plants vs. Zombies but today we are learning that the company may be in a bit of trouble. In a report that has been corroborated by several different websites, PopCap has been laying off people quietly for the past few months. Then today came news that PopCap had laid off approximately 50 people from their Seattle offices.
In addition, their international offices in Dublin and Shanghai have been shut down according to the twitter account of 3D Realms founder George Broussard. He also tweeted: “EA bought PopCap a year ago for a billion dollars. Sources say shakeup and layoff’s are imminent at PopCap.” Apparently Broussard believes that EA will restructure PopCap because they want more out of the developer and PopCap may have a hard time handling EA’s demands: “I think PopCap will struggle to be successful in an EA world that demands more products, squeezing IP dry and less dev time.”
Some former PopCap employees also came forward to say that they were unfortunately laid off as well. Associate producer Veronica Peshterianu tweeted: “So anyone know of any baller game producer jobs out there? The PopCap layoff cookie did not crumble in my favor today 
“. Former producer Ty Robers added: ”I’m one of the casualties of PopCap. need a producer?”
Makes sense, EA buys a company thinking that they will just automatically make money by doing so and it totally backfires on them. It was just last year that EA bought PopCap for around $750 million and now they are restructuring the company probably because they haven’t produced thirty games yet.
EA is quite possibly the most incompetently run gaming company in the world, they just can’t seem to do anything right. It probably stems from being a gaming company that is run by people who have no idea about the gaming industry. They probably figured that PopCap would be one of those social gaming companies that spits out a new game every five hours and that at least a few of them would be successful. When that didn’t happen they started restructuring PopCap, screwing over many individuals who have now lost their jobs due to incompetence.
EA has not officially announced anything and they probably won’t, and there is no word on whether this will affect the Plants vs. Zombies sequel due out next year.
