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Take-Two’s purchase of social gaming giant Zynga will dwarf last year’s Bethesda acquisition
Take-Two, the publisher behind some of the biggest names in gaming like Grand Theft Auto and NBA 2K, today announced a deal to buy mobile game company Zynga for $12.7 billion. If the acquisition of the FarmVille creator goes through, it will mark the biggest sale in video game history.
A spokesperson for Take-Two Interactive wrote in a press release that the deal “unifies highly complementary businesses, including Take-Two’s best-in-class portfolio of console and PC games and Zynga’s industry-leading mobile franchises.” With the merger, Take-Two would have an established pipeline to bring more of GTA, BioShock, XCOM, Civilization, and other franchises to social and mobile platforms.
“We believe we have the best collection of console and PC intellectual property in the interactive entertainment business and it’s basically nearly entirely un-exploited from mobile and free-to-play around the world,” Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick told investors during a call today. “Zynga’s best-in-class studios can help us develop that property. Their best-in-class free-to-play mobile publishing operations can bring that to consumers and delight those consumers and create recurrent consumer spending along the way.”
In addition to FarmVille and Words With Friends, Zynga’s biggest games in recent years include CSR Racing 2, Zynga Poker, and a host of slot machine games, all of which are free-to-play and make money off of in-game advertising and microtransactions. Zynga is also preparing to launch Star Wars: Hunters, an arena combat game coming to Nintendo Switch, iOS, and Android later this year, after previously being delayed.
Source: Kotaku
