Big companies just love to flog the little guys with their money these days. Some recent examples of this would be Facebook flogging Instagram with a billion dollars and Zynga’s purchase of OMGPOP for $180 million. Now Zynga is saying that we should all expect more deals like the OMGPOP buy-out in the near future.
According to Zynga CEO Mark Pincus, over the next three to five years we should see Zynga making more purchases around the same size as the OMGPOP buy-out, developers of the hugely popular Draw Something game. Mark told Bloomberg that Zynga is looking for “great, accomplished teams that share our mission and vision”. Part of the sudden, more aggressive business model of buying developers probably has to due in large part to the fact that Zynga is so heavily reliant on Facebook and that they need to expand in order to compete with their competition from companies like EA, GREE, Disney and other similar social gaming companies.
Not everyone is about selling to Zynga though. Rovio turned down an apparent $2 billion bid Zynga made to buy the Angry Birds developers. Even though Zynga likes to move fast when looking to acquire a new company, they also are quite thorough when doing their research according to Barry Cottle, the man in charge of acquisitions.
“We’re sitting in a very advantageous position. We have a significant amount of cash, we have no debt, and we have access to debt to be as aggressive as we need to be. We pride ourselves on being able to move fast, not because we’re not thorough, but because we have a pretty strong playbook when it comes to doing acquisitions.” – Barry Cottle, Zynga
A lot of people tend to dislike it when a major company like Facebook or Zynga buy a company they really like. Instagram is a good example of this where a fair amount of people were not too happy over the company being bought by Facebook the other week. People tend to associate these types of purchases with the downfall of the product that was purchased in some fashion. Still, it is pretty interesting to see a company come out and bluntly say that we can expect more deals like the OMGPOP one to come in the near future.
So any guesses as to what companies Zynga could be looking at? Let us know your guesses in the comments below as well as your thoughts about deals like this and Instagram’s purchase.
Website Referenced: PocketGamer Biz
