Above: Let us make you an offer you can't refuse
Good news for all you mobile game developers out there: Zynga, now a public company, has a big chunk of available cash on hand and says it’s aggressively looking for the next big thing to spend part of its $1.8 billion on.
Zynga chief executive Mark Pincus, along with mergers and acquisitions chief Barry Cottle, told Bloomberg News that they are on the hunt for the next OMGPOP and plan to do several deals of that size in the coming years.
“We love finding great, accomplished teams that share our mission and vision,” Pincus told Bloomberg. “If we ever see breakout opportunities that massively accelerate social gaming at Zynga, we’ll aggressively pursue those, too.”
Cottle was the first sign of that relentless hunger. He was poached away from Electronic Arts, where he helped expand EA’s mobile gaming with the acquisition of Playfish, by a very generous $25 million package from Zynga.
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Zynga has an on-the-ground fixer who works with newly purchased teams to bring them up to speed on seemingly everything, including game testing and changing over their health insurance. The fact that Zynga can offer liquid stock in a public company doesn’t hurt either.
CEO Mark Pincus is apparently dispatched personally when a startup needs to be convinced that Zynga is a friendly place to work. As our own Dean Takahashi has reported, Zynga has had a hard time shaking its “evil” image. Then again, most everyone has a price.
