There was lots of interesting news coming out the of the world of social games, none warranting it’s own article entry though.
Hence, our social games news wrap-up for the day!
There was lots of interesting news coming out the of the world of social games, none warranting it’s own article entry though.
Hence, our social games news wrap-up for the day!
How much is your games company worth to Playdom?
We don’t know how much Playdom has spent in total for all its acquisitions this year, but we now have a clue regardless it’s purchase of game developer Hive7 earlier this year. According to Techcrunch, SEC filings show that Playdom paid Hive7 $851,498 worth of shares; it’s unknown how much the cash component of the deal was. My best guess would be that the best-case scenario for Hive7 is that they could have sold for as much cash as stock making it a $1.7 million transaction.
This is about as much as I would guess Playdom is paying for each of its acquired companies – $1 – 2 million tops, though I would assume the majority of any transaction is in stock. Playdom is purchasing game studios at their most vulnerable moment – after they have staffed up, when their games are showing no growth, and Facebook making it harder to make money on its network. If Playdom is paying anything over $1 million for their acquisitions, they are being generous.
Offerpal downsizes as Facebook Credits gets accepted as the standard micro-transaction engine for social games.
As more companies convert to Facebook Credits because (a) it’s the most amazing micro-transaction system since sliced bread (b) it’s Facebook’s system, so you’d have to be a fool not to use it, companies whose bread and butter in micro-transaction payments and offers are starting to face the music. Offerpal announced layoffs today (Techcrunch).
Offerpal has been making all the right moves expanding as fast as it can beyond Facebook to Yahoo!, iPhone, Android, etc, but need to be lucky to make this strategy work. They and similar companies are dependent on the ability of Yahoo!, Google, and Apple to compete with Facebook in order to win.
As much as I point out that Facebook seems intend of throwing its dominant position away with questionable business and product decisions, it’s millions and millions of active users allow it to be the dominant player in social games today and in the future.
What is Facebook were a country?
Visual Economics as a great graphic showing what the Facebook economy would look like if the popularity of countries were shown as countries. Not surprisingly, Zynga is the largest land mass, bigger than a lot of corporate and good cause apps.
It’d be interesting to see what this map looks like later this year as gaming apps continue to slow growth.
More on Zynga-Google Deal, Confirmed by No One
Finally, the pundits are weighing in on the supposed Zynga-Google Deal. Strangely, all the big blog sites claim to have verified the details of the deal through sources, but Zynga and Google have not commented.
Until they do, it’s hard to say that this is a definite deal. I don’t have a degree in journalism, but it seems fishy that everyone is saying that Google invested $100 million in Zynga (Social Times says $200 million, no clue where they came up with that number) but no one can quote an actual named source. Here are links to more stories about it:
PC World – Google and Zynga – Five Burning Questions
Social Times – Game Changer: Google Secretly Invested $200 million in Zynga
Inside Social Games – Zynga has a new investor and social gaming platform provider: Google
