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San Francisco based gaming company Zynga, which created Farmville, is buying Turkish gaming company Peak for $1.8B in a half stock, half cash deal. Which is $900M of each for those of you two didn’t pass pre-calc until college.
This isn’t the first time Z & P have gotten in bed together. Back in 2017, Zynga bought Peak’s mobile card game business for a crispy cool $100M. They should be legally required to give some of that to us for all the Farmville requests we got on Facebook.
So, why Peak?
While you may not have heard of Peak, you may have a couple of its games on your phone. The Istanbul based company created popular mobile games Toon Blast and Toy Blast, which have been in the top 20 most popular mobile games on the iTunes app for the past two years. Hopefully, they use some of that fresh cash for a couple more creatives for their game names.
This acquisition potentially benefits Zynga in two big ways. The first being that Zynga gets these two popular games under its belt without investing in the R&D for creating them. This is huge, considering an expensive spend in R&D doesn’t necessarily equate to a successful game. As Curt Schilling knows oh so well.
Additionally, this gives Zynga a whole new international market to advertise and cross-sell its games. Peak’s 12M+ daily active users are primarily abroad. I wonder how they say “Farmville” in Armenia?
The bottom line…
This is the second billion-dollar-plus deal in two weeks that was done completely remotely thanks to COVID-19 (if you recall, Cisco bought ThousandEyes on May 28 for $1B).
This shows that the pandemic is changing the way mergers and acquisitions are being done. Companies can save costs and time by handling the business remotely via Zoom and other remote meeting technologies. RIP in peace to the three martini lunch.
Water Cooler Talking Point(s)
💧 “It’s nice to see the Zynga and Peak execs at least had their deal sleds on yesterday, even if the rest of their attire was their WFH pajamas.” (Nick, The Water Coolest HQ)
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