Playdom stock holders are jumping in their seats as media titan Disney buys up the company for 563.2 million. Another 200 million is on the table if Playdom can meet certain unspecified performance goals in its takeover of Facebook. With casual gaming becoming the buzz word and millions latching on to free to play games, Disney is hoping to leverage a deeply entrenched Playdom. Of all the gaming companies swarming to take a piece of Facebooks 42 million deep audience (active players), Playdom has managed to secure itself into the number two position, obviously somewhere behind Zynga.
What does this mean for the casual gamers out there? Tons more Disney in your Facebook status updates, care to help Peter Pan find his way home? Disney is hoping Playdom can use its position to inject new games using the Disney franchise, providing Playdom with familiar characters and brands. Robert A. Iger, President and CEO, The Walt Disney Company stated he seen strong potential in “bringing together Playdom’s talented team and capabilities with our great creative properties, people and world-renowned brands like Disney, ABC, ESPN and Marvel.” Those brands are what Disney is hoping will allow its newly acquired Playdom to propel itself to first place. Tons of new games are added to Facebook daily, as every person with an idea and a little coding experience can drop one on the social network behemoth. Most of those games however are lacking something to draw in the casual audience other then a premise; they needed pixie dust and a harem of princesses to really get going.
While Zynga may be in the lead of the market, attempting to horde all of the estimated $835 million in virtual sales that take place on Facebook, Disney and Playdoms chief rival will be EA and its newly acquired Playfish. EA some time ago purchased Playfish for the sum of 408 million and has used its brands, already targeted toward gamers, to help keep Playfish sandwiched between the social gaming giants.
Only time will tell if this race to acquire the top dogs of social gaming will pay off, or if the market will begin to dwindle as people get fed up with Facebook spam.
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