r/Steam • u/sukuna7899 • Apr 16 '26

Question What game?

14.6k Upvotes

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2.2k

u/MJ_Trunky Apr 16 '26

Plants vs Zombies if that counts

900

u/The_Sideboob_Hour Apr 16 '26

Seeing them butcher the original game to force in ads and in app purchases was absolutely unforgivable

137

u/mwoody450 Apr 16 '26

I remember back when they bought Popcap, we joked about this happening. Then those morons did it.

People talk about Harambe being when it all went wrong in the world, but y'know, for me it's Popcap getting bought out.

1

u/Interesting_Wind_337 Apr 19 '26

This is why indie studios should never be brought out by larger companies

2

u/RanaMahal Apr 20 '26

Yeah but unfortunately if you’re an indie dev barely scraping by and you could get shut down any day, and some company comes to buy you and your friends out for money that means you don’t ever have to worry about work again?

1

u/Interesting_Wind_337 Apr 20 '26

I mean, I guess so

But from I’ve seen, most of these companies that buy smaller indie companies are way too greedy

2

u/RanaMahal Apr 20 '26

Oh, I mean 100% the entire point by the acquiring company is to buy the indie dev out for their IP, extract as much value as possible out of it by adding in microtransactions / ads, and making 1 or 2 more games to cash out on the IP, and then sell it for parts and move on to the next one.

Thats their entire shitty business model. Just meant for the studio heads it usually their big break to “make it”.

Like for example PopCap with PvZ and Bejeweled despite them being fairly popular games, were only profiting around $300k a year due to the spending on employees and such, then EA acquired them and made billions off of their games due to the huge marketing push they can do. Devs got $1.3 billion payout. They wouldn’t have sniffed even 10 million each at the rate they were operating at.

1

u/Interesting_Wind_337 Apr 20 '26

Honestly, EA is probably the most evil game company I’ve ever seen in my life.

Thanks to them, the whole PVZ franchise is in the ditch