PopCap's Jason Kapalka (Part One)

They tried, Electronic Arts did try their own versions of Facebook games that didn't work out very well, and that's why I think they acquired PlayFish as a way to buy their way in. Whether it works out, it's hard to say. Part of it is trying to integrate a very different company into the bigger structure. Will it happen? If it does, that'll be good. But it's going to be tough.

Amongst other things, those companies tend to have earn-outs, which means that PlayFish will have to have a big earn-out probably, which means they can't just do whatever they like, they have to give EA the freedom to make money and therefore make back their investment. Which is probably three years of letting them do whatever they need to get their earnings up. Which'll be good for making money, but maybe not for integrating them into the EA mothership... And I think you'll see that in a lot of that, where the integration into the bigger company may be quite difficult because the cultures are very difficult and the terms of the acquisition make it hard.

So that'll be the question. Whether companies like EA or Disney can really digest these purchases and really incorporate them into their corporate culture in a way that changes their thinking going forwards. If they just buy them and sit them there in a silo, they might do alright, but they won't change their overall culture. This I can speak of because I was at Pogo. Pogo got bought by EA, it continues to be a profitable business, but it's really just sat in a little silo by itself. It's never really been incorporated into the rest of EA in useful way, and the rest of EA has never really I think learned the lessons that Pogo might have had to teach them, in terms of how Pogo was a social game company in 1999.

They still are – they're a bit dated, they're still using what was considered social media in 1999, which was chatrooms. Which nowadays seems more like... when people say chatrooms, they think of it as a den of perverts, they don't think of it as a family gaming destination. But in 1999 it was. They got them and they left them frozen in time, so they haven't really evolved.

But they would run that risk with acquisitions now; if they do the wrong thing those companies are going to end up frozen in amber and they never really change because a lot of their motivation for evolving on a Darwinist basis is taken away. Maybe it'll work; it's definitely going to be very interesting for the next year or so, I suspect.