Electronic Arts Moves Into Middle Age by Buying Pogo.com

Next, Electronic Arts' (ERTS Quote) sideburns go.

The video game leader had already bought a spectrum of button-down shirts at the Gap to cover up its busty-lady tattoos for the AOL crowd in November 1999. This week it stepped into a pair of Dockers as it purchased video-poker and Hearts mainstay Pogo.com for an undisclosed amount Wall Street pegs between $30 million and $50 million. Next stop, frumpy sweaters with the horsy logo.

Hugely popular Pogo.com enhances EA's reputation in the cocktail party world of adult online gamers, quiet competition far from the best-selling burnouts of Nascar 2000 and the bone crunches of Madden NFL 2001. The world's biggest independent video game maker is tinkering with its strategy in an effort to turn newly launched EA.com into a major revenue stream of the future.

EA.com generated $11.2 million in revenue in the third quarter of 2000 ended Dec. 31, compared to $629.9 million in EA's core video games business. Pogo.com's more mature registered audience is 55% female, it logs 70% of its users from the 18-49 age group and 20% of players are over age 50. This is the decidedly unhip territory EA tiptoed into with the AOL deal and development of its own family game efforts. Bite your knuckle over Pogo.com's statistics: an average monthly user play time average of around 3 hours, 17 million registered members and the Jupiter Media Metrix title of "stickiest" site on the Web in January 2001. ...