From Successful to Slowly Dying : The "Plants Vs Zombies" Franchise

A very large number of video game and media enthusiasts have most likely heard at least once of the hit-franchise "Plants vs Zombies" and it's multiple iterations throughout the years. Starting from it's initial debut in 2009 and all the way to it's current new iteration redevelopment in 2025, under the name of "Plants vs Zombies 3 : Welcome to Zomburbia", the franchise has suffered both backlash and positive reviews.

Though, nothing can last forever, and time proved that the franchise is shortly but surely coming to an end. So, why is it happening ?

The first ever iteration in the franchise was the classic "Plants vs Zombies", a tower-defense game based around, well, plants and zombies. At the time of it's release to the public in 2009, there was never a game that brought so much to the table as this one did. You defend your house from rotting, brain-eating zombies by using sentient plants to repel them - that, on paper, is already an idea that would attract the public eye.

Developed by PopCap Games and taking no less than three and a half years of development, the game was released on PC and Mac OS X for people to express their opinions on the game. Fortunately, the development was not in vain, as many players found the game to be very fun, unique and overall addicting in some aspects. Tons of positive reviews and downloads spoke and PopCap happily revealed that the game had a huge success on the App Store alongside it selling just over 300.000 copies in just under 10 days following it's launch.

The game was so well received that it was part of nominations for big titles, such as the "Strategy Game Of The Year" title, while also managing to make the video game communities at that time, and nowadays also, to refer to it as one of the best video games ever made.

EA ( Electronic Art Inc. ) is a video game company originated from California and founded in May of 1982. The company took interest into PopCap's huge success with "Plants vs Zombies" and bough PopCap for a whopping over 650$ million in straight cash in July of 2011. Closely to two years after EA took the rights of PopCap Games, another hit-game from the franchise, developed by PopCap, would make the market and other game competitors tremble before it, under the title "Plants vs Zombies 2 : It's About Time", later renamed to simply "Plants vs Zombies 2".

A little less than two months after being published under EA's ownership in July, the game was reported to top over 25 MILLION downloads, stepping over it's predecessor by having more downloads than it had in it's whole lifetime since it's release in 2009.

Though, there was a feature that many players complained about, that being microtransactions. EA published the game as free-to-play, but they still searched to getting some revenue through in-game purchases - gems, coins and, most shockingly of all, plants. As even pointed out at the time by a still-relevant YouTuber named "ZackScottGames", some of the original plants from the original game have been put behind a paywall, without any other possibility of achieving them.

The use of microtransactions caused some noise in the community, but overall the game was in good shape and many people even overlooked this aspect.

Shortly after the second game's release on the App Store, PopCap took it a step further and decided to try something new - making a third-person shooter game where players can choose whether to play plants or zombies in an online, PVP environment. This is how what is known now as "Plants vs Zombies : Garden Warfare" took life on February of 2014.

On launch, the game was well received and though it was stated not to be great, it still maintained a solid position in the video game community, with many players trying it out and enjoying it's different gameplay elements and mechanics that were unique to it while also some appreciating that the franchise took a "detour" from it's original ideas.

Just two years after the launch of the first third-person shooter, another one would soon hit the market in January of 2016, published under the name "Plants vs Zombies : Garder Warfare 2". The gameplay was similar to the original, still remaining a third-person shooter divided into teams of plants and zombies, but with tons more added content - more character variants, abilities, maps - all contributed to the game being even more well received by the players, many stating it to be even better than the first and considering it outright good in most regards, as opposed to the original's "mediocre" state.

All in all, so far the franchise seemed to have a constant streak of success, both in it's tower-defense genre and third-person shooter genre. But, as history was soon to tell, the next two iterations in the franchise would make it lose face for a huge amount of the player base.

Without any further notice from the developers or even with any proper teases, "Plants vs Zombies : Battle for Neighborville" was released in October of 2019. Upon launch, many players were astounded that PopCap released yet another shooter, many players criticizing that they should've at least teased the upcoming game rather than publishing it out of nowhere.

Though not all bad, many fans considered the game to be too "cartoonish" and "too different" from the initial shooters PopCap developed prior, with some stating the game was "their least favorite from the three shooters", even though it was the most recent and modern one released.

The character roster expanded even more and the game, like always with EA's leadership, was riddled with content packs and other features that you could obtain via real-world cash. One other massive "feature" the player base hated was the exclusion of "Packs", which were the first and second's shooters way of obtaining minions, character variants and cosmetics. Instead, it was replaced with a single-drop system that was "too overpriced" in the in-game star currency and that gave just ONE item per roll.

The last and most important change that made the game be viewed badly by fans was the outright exclusion of character variants in both plants and zombies. This alone was one change that affected the entire player base's view of the game and made gameplay not as "unique" as it's previous shooter variants and overall be looked down upon.

As of now, the franchise is expecting it's 3'rd mobile iteration, under the name "Plants vs Zombies 3 : Welcome to Zomburbia", to be redesigned by the developers, as the first time it was published it received massive backlash.

The franchise overall is good and still has active players, but if the current development behind it continues to release more "child-like" designed games and only care about microtransactions instead of solid content delivery, like the last shooter iteration was mentioned to be, the series would face a total downfall in most of it's titles if not in it's overall presence.