If you can’t beat em, buy em. Zynga is all set to purchase OMGPOP, the maker of the phenomenally addictive game and app, Draw Something. The acquisition price is rumored to be around $200 million.
If you haven’t been online for the last few weeks, Draw Something is an addictive game where you draw something and then have your friend guess what it is. It’s a smash hit on Facebook and the iPhone and iPad apps are at the tops of the App Store charts. It’s tough to really describe why this is so fun and addictive but it definitely is.
With the purchase, the now-public Zynga will be gaining an extremely popular franchise and the team behind it. As we’ve seen with other buys, the OMGPOP acquisition could help Zynga its efforts in mobile.
Zynga still gets a lot of users and traction from Facebook but it is trying to attract gamers from its own zynga.com portal so it can avoid the 30 percent fee Facebook charges. The move into mobile apps will also help it avoid Facebook but it is still going to have to face revenue cuts from the likes of Apple, Google and Microsoft.