Zynga announced that key contributors to the renowned cocos2d for iPhone open source project, Ricardo Quesada and Rolando Abarca, are joining the company’s team. The cocos2d is widely used by developers globally, including large players like Atari, ngmoco, Gamevil and Zynga, in the development mobile games for iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad and Mac. In that sense the two developers will “greatly augment Zynga’s presence in the mobile space.”
Ricardo and Rolando join Zynga through the acquisition of certain assets of Sapus Media, which is/was focused on developing professional tools for mobile game developers. Zynga is not acquiring the community site, cocos2d-iphone.org, which will continue to be managed separately by the cocos2d administrators.
Zynga has been steadily working to strengthen its position in the mobile industry – this is their 13th announced acquisition in 12 months. Earlier they’ve acquired Beijing, China-based XPD, Challenge Games from Austin, Unoh Games (Tokyo), Conduit Labs (Boston), Dextrose AG (Frankfurt), Bonfire Studios (Dallas), Newtoy Inc. (McKinney, Texas), Flock team, Area/Code (New York), Floodgate Entertainment (Boston), Market Zero (Texas) and Wonderland Software (UK).