Zynga Buys OMGPOP for $200 Million - The UpStream

Zynga Buys OMGPOP for $200 Million

posted Saturday Mar 24, 2012 by Nicholas DiMeo

Zynga Buys OMGPOP for $200 Million

For a little over a year now, Zynga has been making a name for itself on its own. When investors started looking at the company as not just connected to Facebook and FarmVille, Zynga went and told the social media giant that they'd probably be better off as just friends, and decided to branch out and do something on its own. At the beginning of this year, we saw Zynga gain more investor popularity and the company has even started its own gaming platform, giving 240 million of its customers direct access to not only its own games, but games of partners it's been scooping up in the process.

This week, Zynga made another big purchase and bought the developer studio OMGPOP. Up until this point, the New York-based company was just another game studio that most people probably never heard of until the Draw Something craze hit shortly before Zynga picked them up to the tune of around $200 million.

Why the purchase and what happens now to your newest version of Pictionary? We discuss that more after the break.

You may or may not have known but OMGPOP has been around since 2006 and has developed about 35 other titles for both Facebook and mobile devices. However, none of those titles have taken off as well as Draw Something, which seemingly went global overnight. The company has recorded 1 billion drawings through 84 different languages just last week alone, which comes out to 3,000 per second.

Why or how this game grew to be so viral so fast is beyond me, however, I do know from experience that its simpler play-style combined with common, yet funny words, tends to do the trick. Plus, you can play multiple games at once while you wait for Allante to draw his word.

At any rate, $200 million is a lot for Zynga to throw out at one studio, however they will end up attracting that many more people directly to Zynga.com and the revenue from the in-game purchasing systems will now go to their pockets. Plus, perhaps with the backing of Zynga we will now see these guys at OMGPOP make a couple of more hit games in a row. Zynga wanted the talent of the studio with the check they wrote.

It may turn out that all gaming will end up going through Zynga in a few years, perhaps even the games like Bread That Cat over at Shockwave. Are you on the mobile gaming sensation yet? Tell us in the comments section below.

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