EA acquires Playfish for $300 million and a $100 million earnout

If you still think that social gaming is irrelevant, guess again! Today Electronic Arts has closed their acquisition of the social gaming startup Playfish, for $275 million in cash. EA also payed $25 million in stocks, as well as $100 million in earnouts, which comes to a $400 million total deal.

Playfish is based in London and has developed games for Facebook, MySpace, and number of other social media sites. They claim to have some 60 million monthly users, and their top games include Pet Society, Restaurant City, and who has the Biggest Brain.

The EA acquisition of Playfish shows a serious shift in the direction of gaming. Social gaming has become more and more popular with the growth of social networking. EA will be one of the first major console publishers to step into the social gaming realm. Many more may be soon to follow.

A few of the other top social gaming companies include Zynga and Playdom.

TechCrunch

Related posts:

1. Intuit acquires Mint for $170 million
2. Seesmic acquires Ping.fm for undisclosed sum
3. Dell acquires Perot Systems for $3.9 billion
4. Dell sees 6.5 million in revenue through Twitter

Tags: EA busy Playfish, EA buys Playfish, EA Playfish, eletronic Arts Playfish, Playfish aquisition, playfish EA

This entry was posted on Monday, November 9th, 2009 at 3:20 pm and is filed under Internet Trends. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.