Plants vs. Zombies developer cuts staff

A number of staff are being cut from PopCap, the developer behind the popular Plants vs. Zombies game.

A Plants vs. Zombies sequel was announced earlier this week, but the company has since confirmed that about 50 staff will lose their jobs due to the need to manage costs.

PopCap co-founder, John Vechey, explained reasons for the cuts in a company blog: "In North America there are about 50 people who will no longer work at PopCap. We've hired aggressively this past year and PopCap is still growing.

"Even with the cuts we expect to end the year with roughly the same number of people we started with."

Vechey claimed that free-to-play, social and mobile gaming had changed.

He added: "Free-to-play, social and mobile games have exploded in popularity. That happened fast. Surprisingly so. The change in consumer tastes requires us to reorganise our business and invest in new types of games on new platforms. It's a completely different world from when we started.

"To stay in business, we need to manage costs, improve efficiency and maintain a profit."

Vechey went on to say that the cuts were down to PopCap and not EA, who bought the company last year.

"The decision to reorganise was 100% made by us, with no pressure from EA. Some of the people affected by the reorganisation may be retrained and reassigned to other jobs in the EA studios.

"If we didn't have EA behind us, the cuts would have been worse."