Game maker Electronic Arts is expanding its business into new platforms via its latest acquisition, PopCap Games. The latter is responsible for hits including Plants Vs. Zombies, and had a price tag to match. EA will pay $650 million in cash, $100 million worth of its shares and a maximum of another $550 million if PopCap will achieve revenues of at least $343 million in the next two years.

“EA said it expects the acquisition to add at least ten cents to the company’s fiscal 2013 earnings, excluding certain items,” reports The Wall Street Journal.  “About 80% of PopCap’s business comes from faster-growing digital forms of gaming.”

EA and game makers across the industry have been seeing a decline in sales of boxed copies of their video games, which is why the acquisition seems like a good move. Not all of EA’s investors share this belief though, and due to the steep price of the acquisition the company’s shares dropped 3.2 percent in after-hour trading.

Electronics Art had a good reason however, considering that Zynga was one of several competitors that bid on PopCap. Zynga dominates one of the fastest growing gaming platforms of them all – Facebook – but its mobile efforts have not been nearly as successful as its games on the social network.

EA outbid Zynga for PopCap, but the latter did make another acquisition to compliment its strategy.  Earlier this month, the social game maker acquired Canadian mobile app developer Five Mobile for an undisclosed sum, but that doesn’t mean making acquisitions is not the only way game developers are expanding these days. EA is developing a new Xbox competitor, while PopCap debuted Plants Vs. Zombies in China last week.