Plants Vs. Zombies is set to receive a multiplatform remaster.
As shared by Gematsu on BlueSky, Brazil’s video game rating agency, the Classificação Indicativa, has rated Plants Vs. Zombies Reloaded for PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series XS, Nintendo Switch, iOS and Android.
The rating page indicated it received a rating of L, short for Livre para todos os públicos. This is Brazil’s equivalent of the ESRB’s E for Everyone rating.
Plants Vs. Zombies started out as a PC tower defense game from independent studio PopCap. Thanks to PopCap’s success with games such as this, Peggle, Bejeweled, and Zuma’s Revenge, they became a major player in casual PC gaming before the term indie game became popular.
In 2011, they were acquired by EA, which turned out to both be a boon and bane for the company and it’s Ips. While many believe that EA itself is the cause of the company’s woes, those who know where to look will have learned from former employees that their own management and its startup culture was to blame.
Under EA, PopCap has sporadically released new games in their biggest Ips. Their biggest project has been Plants Vs. Zombies Garden Warfare, a casual friendly third person shooter franchise.
They also released Plants Vs. Zombies 3 earlier this year, so choosing to remake the original now seems like a strange move. It’s also odd that the game was scaled down for the Switch, but not PlayStation 4 & Xbox One. Subsequently, there could be enhancements for PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series XS, such as having more units on screen. If that’s the case, why is there no mention of a Switch 2 port?
But then again, this is not an official communications from PopCap or EA, so those ports may also be coming in the future. Subsequently, EA may have made deals with Apple Arcade, Amazon Luna, Netflix or Epic Game Store on mobile, and those can’t be announced here.
The Plants Vs. Zombies franchise is certainly in a strange place where it’s one of those big casual gaming hits, but even that in itself feels firmly set in the past as gamers are now in what may turn out to only be the latest seemingly ubiquitous trend in live service games. And like PopCap’s games, they may also turn out to have a lifetime, and when that time comes, some studios and developers won’t be ready for the shift in business yet again.
As some fans have correctly pointed out, this comes after the rerelease of the MySims games. EA may be looking to greenlight more rereleases of their classic games in the near future. Depending on what they dig out, there may be real cause for fans to be excited in the future.
