You might have heard that Plants vs. Zombies is coming to Android, but you won’t be finding it in the official Market any time soon. Developer PopCap Games has just struck an exclusivity agreement with Amazon to sell both Chuzzle and PvZ through their app store instead. Both will be available for free on their first day, and going for $2.99 afterwards. As far as timelines go, Chuzzle is being launched tomorrow, while PvZ will be coming out later this month.
If you haven’t had a chance to try out either of these classic Flash games, Plants vs. Zombies is a kind of tower defense game, where you have to use various plants to defend your front yard from waves of eccentrically-armed zombies. You have to pick your weapons based on the time of day and which part of your house the zombies are attacking, and after successfully defending, spend rewarded points on new kinds of plants. Plants vs. Zombies has a great sense of humour, and solid strategic gameplay to boot. Chuzzle is an older PopCap game, and closely follows the tried-and-true formula set by Bejeweled. Instead of swapping the positions of coloured icons however, your moving entire rows and columns to match up three of a kind and get points.
Even though the length of the exclusivity for Chuzzle and PvZ on the Amazon Store wasn’t disclosed, this is a huge win for Amazon. I’m curious to see if PopCap will remain in Google’s good graces enough to hit featured status should either game make it to the Android Market. Given the massive popularity of the franchise and the already-established mobile presence PopCap has on iOS, I can’t imagine
[via PR Newswire, pic]
Update: Just heard from PopCap – they say that both games will make it to the Android Market after the two-week promotional period. That makes the announcement a bit less exciting, but at least we know to keep an eye on the Amazon App Store to get them for free on the first day of launch.