The Tragic Demise of Plants vs. Zombies

I am really open to any feedback or your thoughts. I know I said some "spicy" things, but I'm curious to hearing all your guys' opinions/thoughts! Especially in regard to you content creators (some of which I called out sorry lol) and how you feel about my assessment of the PvZ franchise? Thanks! MODS CLARIFICATION: Hey! So, it’s disappointed me to see a huge misconception regarding my stance on mods. I have absolutely nothing against mods, including the current popular mods. The wording was poor, and I own up to that. At 37:27 I acknowledge Reflourished and how it’s picking up and building off of PvZ 2, yet do not want to comment further because after my bad experience with ECLISE, I would prefer to steer away from mods. My message came off as an attack on the mods themselves which was not the goal. I hope this clarification takes away some of the ambiguity.

For the "why did they cling so hard to 3d animations when they didn't look good?" There is an answer: 2d animators have a union. 3d animators do not. This is also why animated movies are in 3d even when they try really hard to make it look 2d

The fact they turned a tower defense game into an amazing 3rd person shooter is a feat in itself, Garden Warfare was some of the most fun I’ve had with my younger brother and sister, I miss that game so much.

One thing I think that’s under appreciated is in PvZGW2, you could bring all your progress and levels from PvZGW1 over to it. Including classes and such. That’s incredible that hardly any other multiplayer sequel does!

There is NO WORLD where someone's kid would be playing pvz and go like "Wow it would be cool if we could RENT plants. That would really make this game super fun"

Reaching out to 4 of the developers to gather first-hand accounts of their experience is a level of journalistic integrity you don't really see much on youtube. Good video man

PvZ Heroes could have been a success for EA if they had been more in-touch with the community. The Hearthstone team, from its early days, hosted tournaments, supported streamers, and had constant communication with its community. This resulted in Twitch and YouTube creators advertising and hyping up the game for them, at virtually no cost. The exact opposite is true with PvZ Heroes. I've been streaming the game full time for 7 years, and have gotten virtually no support or meaningful communication from Popcap, despite my best efforts to initiate with them. The business model instead was like a disposable mobile app, and no wonder it sunk. No heart, no soul, no success.

2:28 HI MOM!!

I don't know why it's a hard thing for big corps to understand (definitely not exclusive to EA): if you allow your talent to flourish, they'll give back in multiples. If you deprive them of light and water, they either waste away or leave.

Can't believe I just watch this whole thing in one sit 👵great vid, you dived deep dude 👍

I just genuinely wanna say from the bottom of my heart, thank you for making this video. PVZ means so much to me and has brought such awesome memories for me and this video, fully discussing how it fell and even hurt people is just truly amazing.

Man this series was combo'd to death from all places. From the new developers, to the publisher, to the fans, to the industry. Hell came from everywhere. And using Zombies on Your Lawn as the credits theme was nostalgic, thanks for this.

Fun fact: in the first PvZ, to get the sound effect of butter hitting a zombie's head, Laura Shigihara threw butter at George Fan. (With permission, of course.) I bet nobody at Popcap gets butter thrown at them nowadays...

I wish EA and the Devs could see this and realize their wrongs and how much we want this amazing franchise back.

I love thinking “wow! what a great video! this was a good watch!” and then looking at the timestamp and seeing there’s a hour and a half left.

YouTube randomly put this video on my feed. Never heard of you or seen your videos before, haven't even thought about PvZ in years and barely played it back then. I listened to this entire near 3 hour upload never once getting bored or looking for something else to watch instead. This was such a good documentary with an incredible amount of work put into it, amazing job :)

I did not know that I needed a 2.5 hours video about the fall of pvz but im here for it.

Great video! Even though I covered the topic myself a year ago I found myself amazed at the amount of revelations as to how deep the story goes. This is some next level research and should be heralded as a great piece of gaming journalism. It’s just sad that instead of discussing the fact that a massive childhood game company is on its last legs and is at serious risk of going under, people are too concerned with defending one comment in this nearly three hour long video. Glad to have my theories confirmed about EA’s involvement retroactively making my video age better too 😎😎😎

As someone who handles accounting for companies, I've seen LOTS of mergers and acquisitions. Someone being 'laid off' is often just a low-profile firing. Because firing someone for not cooperating can look a little dictator-y, so instead you put their name on "The List", and whenever team downsizing comes around, they're the first ones to go, so that way you can just blame it on downsizing and nothing personal, even if it definitely is. And often that implicit threat is enough to make people do things they otherwise wouldn't, such as, say, cram microtransactions into an otherwise beloved series. Because if the big boss says that you need to make more revenue, and you say "but MTX are kinda scummy :/", you know you'll be on the list of people who will be gone next time there's any restructuring. So granted PopCap were the ones actually developing, there's an implicit threat by the mere existence of EA hovering over them. You know what happens to unprofitable development studios. I won't blame someone for acting strangely when they're under implicit threat of losing their career, which is why I always blame EA for the ruination, not the individual devs. EA are well-known for scooping up low to middling development companies, tightening up their operating costs and efficiency, and trying to make them as profitable as possible. If any person stands in the way of that, there's little reason for EA to keep them around. Company culture? Sounds like useless expenditure to the suits. Extravagant parties? Wasting money to the suits. Lengthy development cycles for one-time purchase games? Too inefficient and slow for the suits. So you end up with a more generic company with less interesting people pumping out cheaper games with more microtransactions. If it even vaguely looks like it's failing, burn it, try again. Because the development costs are so low with the new method that you're not wasting too much money just slapping together project after project and discarding the old attempts.

Beautifully written and perfect closure to one of my childhood favorites. It's so sad to see the way PVZ fell off, but I'm Happy we got a few good games and memories with family and friends