Adding to rumors of Google building a competitor to Facebook, the search company has reportedly purchased Slide, an application and games developer for social networks, for $182 million.
Founded in 2005, Slide employs some 125 workers across its headquarters in San Francisco and offices in Shanghai and Bandung, Indonesia. Its Facebook and MySpace games and apps, which include titles such as SuperPoke! and Slide FunSpace, attract roughly 27 million unique users each month.
The acquisition, which Google is expected to announced this Friday, supports recent speculation that the internet services giant is talking with social gaming companies such as Disney's Playdom and Electronic Arts's PlayFish about creating a social network -- rumored to be titled "Google Me" -- as a Facebook rival.
Furthermore, reports emerged last month that Google invested between $100 million to $200 million in Zynga, the studio behind FarmVille and the most popular developer on Facebook, according to total monthly active users across its catalog. The partnership was said to be a cornerstone for a Google Games platform launching later this year.
In its report of the Slide acquisition, TechCrunch added that Google has other undisclosed deals in the works for bolstering its social games and apps strategy.
They didn't buy only games, they also bought those 27m users/month for this much. Social gaming is a wonder for me, some just get well off it, some can't. Because it's such a wonder how to get popular in this kind of gaming, they bought a solution. Google knows what it's doing.
it continues to amaze me how traditional game developers hate on the new social gaming scene without knowing much about it. in 5-10 years these new platforms are going to be why most of us have interactive media jobs. btw- Slide has never really claimed to be a game maker. google bought a very specific online infrastrucure, niche app development, alongside a nice chunk of desired online traffic. great pick-up and kudos to slide! they earned it the old fashioned way, through innovation and hard work.
>>it continues to amaze me how traditional game developers hate on the new social gaming scene without knowing much about it.< > in 5-10 years these new platforms are going to be why most of us have interactive media jobs<<
Not unless the games become a lot more interesting. I think the falloff in social game numbers on Facebook indicates it's kind of reached critical mass on the one hand, and is highly dependent on things like nag-screens whining at the players to buy things or invite more players on the other.
joe, please post your data source for the decline in facebook gamers. the news articles last week purporting 9% decrease for certain games is not considered source data imo. the media might have just gotten carried away with the fact that it's summer now ;) there's nothing online that I can find that supports anything but huge growth month on month in the social casual gaming space. also, the decline in specific games such as farmville doesn't mean the sector is down. what's happening now in my opinion is growth and diversity/fragmenting, across different platforms and territories.
bw- it's up to us to make more interesting games ;)
> in 5-10 years these new platforms are going to be why most of us have interactive media jobs<<
Not unless the games become a lot more interesting. I think the falloff in social game numbers on Facebook indicates it's kind of reached critical mass on the one hand, and is highly dependent on things like nag-screens whining at the players to buy things or invite more players on the other.
bw- it's up to us to make more interesting games ;)