Bejeweled Blitz maker PopCap to scale back its social games push

It looks like the Facebook games wave isn't taking PopCap as far as owner EA would like. President of EA Labels Frank Gibeau gave some background on recent layoffs that struck PopCap to Bloomberg in a video interview. Gibeau explained how EA handles recent acquisitions, and then went into the real reasons behind cutting the fat at PopCap.

"So with PopCap, what we found is that there are some areas inside PopCap that were duplicative of what EA was doing; a lot of central resources, legal, business affairs those types of things so we accelerated the integration there," Gibeau told Bloomberg. "We also looked at pivoting a little bit harder towards mobile and away from social so we made some adjustments."

As a result, PopCap was forced to let go of staffers at its North American and Dublin studios. Gibeau believes that the social games market is flattening out. With that, EA looks to leverage PopCap as a major player in its stab at a larger piece of the mobile games pie, which sadly meant lots of lost jobs for talented folks in PopCap's social games divisions. Gibeau's explanation:

"We're pivoting hard toward mobile because it is the fastest-growing segment of the interactive games business right now and it's certainly probably pulling most of the activity off social, and that's why you see the flattening in social right now, and frankly where the problem is that Zynga's encountering."

[Via GamesIndustry]

Do you think this was reason enough for the layoffs? What do you think of PopCap's social games? Sound off in the comments. Add Comment.