PopCap CEO: "Every indication is, that EA like us as we are"

PopCap CEO Dave Roberts has said he's rather thrilled with the EA deal, and while one would think anyone would be considering the $750 million handed to the firm, Roberts seems more pleased with the fact EA seems to sincerely care about games and in the end, that's good news for PopCap.

Speaking with the Guardian, Roberts said despite the sale of PopCap to EA, the firm will hopefully still retain "the essence of what we do here."

"One of the things I like about EA – and I don't think this was true of them a few years ago – is that they care about games very passionately," he said. "I think they lost that for a while. The EA of four years ago was the EA that was arrogant and didn't really give a s**t about games. At some point though, and I personally didn't even notice this about EA until around last year, but things had changed. EA was different; people were actually excited about their jobs again, and I don't think that had happened in a while.

"Every indication is, that EA like us as we are. They've not really proven to be very good at making casual content, so there's no reason why they'd want to mess with what we have here.

"We certainly look at it as an opportunity to take some of the things that we've tried to do better on a bigger scale – like massive porting efforts, for example – that we've never been quite as good as EA at doing. We could only do that sort of stuff on a PopCap scale. Teaming up with EA to do that stuff is going to make our lives so much easier; a lot of our game guys will have space and time to work on games and they won't have to spend vast amounts of time on porting efforts."

EA and PopCap announced the deal last week, and will likely chat about it again during EA's Q1 financial call to investors later this evening.