Report: Plants vs Zombies creator laid off from PopCap
There was a surprising casualty in yesterday's PopCap layoffs: George Fan, creator of Plants vs Zombies.
There was a surprising casualty in yesterday's PopCap layoffs. George Fan is best known as the creator of one of PopCap's most endearing games: Plants vs Zombies. And although the company is moving ahead with a sequel to the game, according to a report by 1UP, Fan was part of yesterday's layoffs. (His LinkedIn page has not been updated, however.)
If Fan is no longer involved with Plants vs Zombies, it may explain the curious rumor that surfaced earlier--that the next iteration of the franchise would turn into a multiplayer shooter. While the original game was heralded for its simplicity, a look at Fan's GDC talk reveals how much design work and iteration was necessary to make the game as accessible as it is.
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Shacknews
replyAndrew Yoon posted a new article, Plants vs Zombies creator laid off from PopCap.
There was a surprising casualty in yesterday's PopCap layoffs: George Fan, creator of Plants vs Zombies.-
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Didn't they just announce PvZ 2?
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What the hell is wrong with EA? Seriously that's a load of garbage.
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I mean that pretty much puts a nail in the coffin for me supporting PvZ from here on out. What a bone headed decision.
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Zombie Medal of Plant Honorfield 3 =(
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what if we are all wrong and it was him that was spearheading the FPS PvZ game and EA could only put up with his crap for so long. I wonder what the story behind the FPS really is..
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LOL did you dummies maybe stop to think that maybe HE is the reason PvZ2 is taking so long? and why PvZ1 took so long to make too? LOL
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yeah because EA really wants to slow down and wait a while bfore they can get PvZ2 money
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Because EA doesn't have a history of interfering with successful studios and driving them into the ground.
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while they do, it seems to me they are more likely to rush stuff out the door than to delay it.
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according to wikipedia it took 3 years to make. now its been 3 years since the first was released. a game like that shouldnt take 3 years to make, and a sequel certainly shouldnt take that long either, unless there is some drama happening. if they fired him, there was probably some drama
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not exactly..i mean i am all for giving creators enough time to do their work, but there comes a point where a game is given too much time for what it is, case in point, DNF and The Last Gaurdian. 7 years is a lot of money spent developing what is going to be a niche title for Sony, I honestly don't blame them for getting antsy on TLG.
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not when you bought the company for $1,200,000,000. seriously. 1.2 billion
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I'm not understanding this. Between normal sales and mobile sales (even if it's only iphone sales), it seems like they've made enough money to cover the costs of development over 3 years.
What does buying a company have to do with anything? Why does plants vs zombie, a single game, have to make enough money to cover the cost of buying an entire company?-
popcap was gonna be EA's savior in the social gaming space. making small profits on a non-social game is not what you want your billion dollar acquisition to do. the profits you just described, a social game hit can make that in like a month or two
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and so, that given, if that's the reason why they're firing him, it's still pretty dumb since that's the way pop cap has operated for a while, now.
every EA acquisition seems to end in an inevitable culture clash, as the overall culture of "EA" tries to assimilate developers into the mainstream EA culture and way of doing things (which tends to produce bad results just as often, if not more often, than good results). The problem is almost definitely EA. They are a shitty company.-
but EA needs popcap to be more like zynga now which is a different thing than they used to be
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PoopCap
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Fancom
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Guys none of your suggestions would work because they're very similar to already established companties
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sexy action cool
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Cunt Faced Jags Inc.
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Studio Liverpool
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That's just too far man
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I saw it.
arhughes made a bunch of un-pushed changes to the project, so I don't want to merge anything else in until his code's in, and even then you wrote a lot of code that's going to need to be tested with his changes, etc.
While I love *using* Chromeshack, and really think it's an impressive bit of programming on arhughes' part, I don't necessarily love working on it. While it's annoying that multiple Greasemonkey scripts do the same shit over and over, I find them a hell of a lot easier to debug and work on. If all he does is push up his changes I can start looking at it. I just never really got my head wrapped around how you do ajax callbacks in Chrome extensions, and that's the big problem with the lol stuff in Chome.-
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I just wish Greasemonkey scripts weren't held to the same security standards.
It's almost too bad GM got popular so its usage went outside of the realm of "guys who can read code" to the general populace. All the security crap needed to make it palatable and safe for normal people makes them far less fun to write.
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I can't stop laughing at this for some reason.
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HitlerFan69 Games
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F2P Generals and this? Wow, EA is going to town!
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PopCap is still hiring, though.
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so is zynga, so that doesn't mean much.
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That might work if all you want to do is rehash the same game 20 times. If you want create a new IP you need quality people for that.
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