Zynga, the heavily-funded social gaming company, today announced that it has signed an agreement to acquire Serious Business, fellow creators of social games on Facebook. The terms of the agreement were not disclosed, but it appears to be more of a strategic purchase to bring in more experienced social game development talent.
Serious Business raised $4 million in venture capital from Lightspeed Venture Partners back in April 2008. Its apps for Facebook include the enormously popular and revenue-generating Friends For Sale and Rock Legends.
As part of the agreement, Serious Business employees will join Zynga at the company’s San Francisco headquarters.
Serious Business was founded by Alex Le, former software engineer at Powerset and Yellowpages.com, and Siqi Chen, also formerly with Powerset (which was acquired by Microsoft for $100 million in August of 2008). Both are still in their twenties.
Zynga says it currently has over 235 million monthly active users playing its games. These include FarmVille, Zynga Poker, Mafia Wars, YoVille, Café World, FishVille and PetVille, which are available on a wide range of social networking services and mobile devices.
The company, which was one of the main subjects of our Scamville series, has raised a stunning $219 million in venture capital over 3 rounds (not including angel investor Reid Hoffman’s seed financing).
This is likely just the beginning of a wave of consolidation in the red hot social gaming space.
That’s “serious business”!
Congrats Pincus and the Serious guys!
Hey Zynga, don’t bite the hand that feeds!
Arf!
Hopefully that equates to better development cycles over at Zynga. They seem to either be down or broken as much as their games are on line lately. Horrible test and development process.
There wasn’t much to buy. They haven’t produced anything successful since Friends for Sale. And Zynga’s terms are always very draconian. It’s a fire sale.
It’s a talent acquisition. The Hierarchy is a fantastic app but it didn’t do too well, so it’s more of a tech demo. Hey look, we can use JQuery!
If Zynga’s games can approach the quality of Serious Business games AND retain their virality, everyone else better watch out.
Siqi, you’re my hero. Congrats guys!
The information which you are given in the site is very useful for us. keep it up and give more updations
the funny part about this. We know the guy who was one of the leading flash architects at Zynga who left for Serious Biz. And now hes back at Zynga. I hope he likes them
Ha ha… I can imagine his condition :)
Congrats to Alex & team on the sale!
Congrats Siqi!
Awesome news! I am so happy for you Alex! Congrats, You made it man!