Zynga Acquires OMGPOP Developer of Draw Something

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Zynga (NASDAQ: ZNGA), just announced that it acquired the developer of the hottest gaming app Draw Something.

We wrote about Draw Something last week and the domain name DrawSomething.com

According to a Press release issued minutes ago, Zynga just acquired “New York-based social game developer OMGPOP, makers of the popular cultural hit mobile game, Draw Something, and over 35 additional social games.”

“As a part of the Zynga family, OMGPOP will focus on building new mobile IP and strengthening its existing portfolio of fun and creative social games.

“The OMGPOP team has created a game that’s fun, expressive and engenders real social interaction,” said Mark Pincus, founder and CEO of Zynga. “Draw Something has captured the imagination of millions of people around the world. We love the way they’ve worked playful and relevant culture into their games from Devo to Daft Punk, from Lin to Beckham. We’re honored to have the opportunity to partner with and support such an innovative team of creative inventors.”

“I want to thank our players, our fans, everyone who’s ever drawn something. You’ve made this game into something truly special. Zynga offered us a chance to focus on Draw Something – they know the power of the game and they planned with us how to let it keep rolling in the same fun, irreverent, social way that it has been. That was really important to us,” said Dan Porter, CEO of OMGPOP. “The game will stay true to you and what you love, and it’s my solemn vow that the magic of Draw Something will not change. I know without a doubt that Zynga is the right partner for OMGPOP. Our new partners at Zynga know how to innovate at scale, and they’re pushing the limits of social with their mobile games. With the added resources we now have, and the deep gaming experience we can draw from, we can’t wait to continue to surprise our users. If you’re a fan, a player of ours, I can’t wait to show you what’s in store – it’s going to be drawsome.”

In the six weeks since Draw Something launched, it has been downloaded over 35 million times. Draw Something’s eye-popping stats include:

·         In the last week, more than 1 billion drawings have been created.
·         Draw Something had three drawings per second the day the game launched.
·         Yesterday, Draw Something has over 3,000 drawings per second at its peak.
·         Draw Something is the #1 word game in 84 countries according to the Apple App Store – shout out to Sweden and Norway for being the first two countries to recognize Draw Something’s greatness. Nordic Love!
·         The most popular words in Draw Something are: Starfish, pregnant, hangman, six pack, boom box
·         The least popular word in Draw Something is latrine
·         The best guessed words in Draw Something are: Rainbow, catfish, sun, fish, house, god tornado
·         The least guessed words in Draw Something are: Oar, Metroid, Warhol, pounce, polaroid, meathead, Autobots

“At Zynga we’re committed to building brands that we’re proud of and that our players absolutely love,” said David Ko, Chief Mobile Officer of Zynga. “We want people to play our games and feel a fun and valuable social connection to their friends and family. We think Draw Something is one of the most social, most expressive mobile games ever built with its unique social competition and unmatched player generated content. We’re excited about the brands OMGPOP has developed to date and we look forward to supporting the team’s creativity and helping scale their incredible games to an even bigger global audience.”

OMGPOP began as iminlikewithyou, a social network for people to meet and play games. The company soon after launched its social gaming website, OMGPOP.com in 2009. OMGPOP is best known for Draw Something, one of the fastest growing word games of all time. The game has stormed to success through a combination of creativity and nostalgia paired with pop culture hooks. How would you draw Jeremy Lin, Katniss Everdeen or LMFAO? Draw Something is available on iOS, Android and Facebook.

Today’s announcement follows on the heels the recent announcement of Zynga.com, a new play service that will serve as an online destination dedicated to social games, as well as the Zynga Platform, which will allow third party developers to create and publish games on the Platform. Zynga is currently working closely with select Platform partners, and plans to open up the Zynga Platform and make it more widely available to all third party game developers through an API later this year.

Over the past six months Zynga mobile has been focused on creating fun, high quality, social mobile gaming experience for players on-the-go. With 15 game launches in the past two quarters, Zynga Mobile is bringing a variety of genres and games to reflect its players’ lifestyles and provide them with the social experiences they want, at any time and on any device, regardless of platform.  Zynga Mobile is building evergreen brands like the With Friends franchise including Words With Friends, Scramble With Friends and Hanging With Friends and the Dream franchise.

OMGPOP will remain headquartered in New York (at its totally cool offices) and report to David Ko, Chief Mobile Officer of Zynga””

About Michael Berkens

Michael Berkens, Esq. is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of TheDomains.com. Michael is also the co-founder of Worldwide Media Inc. which sold around 70K domain to Godaddy.com in December 2015 and now owns around 8K domain names . Michael was also one of the 5 Judges selected for the the Verisign 30th Anniversary .Com contest.

Comments

  1. Abdu says

    You can technically square x^2 or cube x^3 the value of the matching domain at this point.

  2. Adam says

    omgpop’s web based games have been a favorite time killer of mine for awhile, since back when they were iminlikewithyou.com . Balloono is one of my faves. . . Porting their games over to mobile was inevitable but WOW did it light the company on fire when that happened.

  3. TLD says

    Ha, 20 minutes after this the DNF Blog writes the same story. Seriously, they need to stop copying the article subjects that are written on TheDomains. It’s obvious and sad.

  4. Gene says

    This type of whirl-wind sale is a great example of how (a) huge value can be created in a heartbeat, out of thin air, based only on combining an idea and the web, and (b) important it is for domainers to be able to anticipate future trends and online activities: Meaning that owning a dot-com on a coined term, which you’ve spent $8 registering today, could be worth six or seven figures in record time. Granted, that that’s not the norm.

    And the other lesson for domainers is to really analyze the potential uses for a particular name, lest you leave a whole lot of money on the table (e.g., DrawSomething.com selling for $3,000 just 2 weeks ago).

  5. M says

    I have to say, I am troubled by the fact that in your other thread, not even one person mentioned the potential trademark/bad-faith purchase argument on behalf of the new buyer. Obviously we don’t have details about the sale, but I’m pretty sure that game was already huge/popular with millions of users a few months back. You can argue “draw something” is a generic phrase all you want, and that may be the case for the original buyer. But a new buyer purchasing the name after the game becomes huge …. come on guys.

  6. Ron says

    Someoene had to have known the deal was going down, and did their homework, and bought that domain, zynga had a leak.

    The trademark is for specific purpose, their are generic arguments that can be made from the domain.

    Also sick of DNFBLOG copying every article from here, and reposting it. We don’t need to keep seeing the same articles over, and over, keep the relevant stuff in page 1.