Mobile ad company Appodeal acquires game platform Corona Labs

Appodeal is announcing that it has acquired Corona Labs, creators of the Corona SDK for building cross-platform games and apps.

The companies say the framework has been used to build more than 10,000 games including The Lost City by Fire Maple Games and HoPiKo by Laser Dog. Appodeal, meanwhile, is a mobile ad mediation company — in other words, it helps app developers manage multiple ad networks.

As a result of the deal, Appodeal says the enterprise version of the Corona framework will be made available for free (other versions were already free), and that the framework will also become open source. At the same time, developers building on Corona won’t be limited to Appodeal — they’ll still be able to use any monetization platform that was previously supported, with the Corona team working to build even more ad partnerships.

“We decided to make even more of the Corona platform free because we believe that there should be more opportunities to develop mobile games of high quality on the market,” said Appodeal founder and CEO Pavel Golubev in the acquisition release. “Additionally, Corona will gradually be transformed into an open-source framework with the first components released as open-source soon after the acquisition formalities are complete.”

Corona Labs has had a rather complicated history. Founded as Ansca Mobile in 2008, it was first acquired by Fuse Powered, then by Perk.com, whose co-founder Roj Niyogi bought Corona when he left Perk last year. Niyogi said he will remain involved as a strategic advisor, while the Corona engineering team joins Appodeal.

The financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.