Social gaming outfit Zynga has announced the acquisition of four Solitaire card game mobile apps.
Buried deep in Zynga’s most recent Form 10-K filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission was the company’s casual announcement that it had bought some Solitaire mobile game apps from US developer Harpan LLC for around $42.5m in cash.
Zynga said it struck the deal with Harpan on February 14 but as the initial accounting for the “business combination” was incomplete, the company planned to record the preliminary purchase price allocation in Q1 2017.
The four games Zynga purchased are Solitaire, Pyramid Solitaire, FreeCell and Spider Solitaire, all of which are available for both iOS and Android devices. Harpan is owned by a pair of brothers, Tim and William Oswald, who can now presumably afford to play card games involving more than one person.
Harpan’s flagship product, Solitaire, is in the top-10 card games in the iOS App Store and is in the top-20 of the overall iOS games category. The app also sits in the top-100 games on the Android download charts but Spider Solitaire never got higher than #439 and #202, respectively, on the iOS and Android download ranking, while the other two apps failed to dent either US chart.
The game currently displays only banner advertising, and Zynga appears to want to further monetize the product by inserting in-game adverts, the type of which accounted for around one-quarter of Zynga’s overall revenue in the company’s most recent earnings report.
In other words, the game that Harpan describes in its App Store product description as boasting “crisp, clear graphics and a straightforward layout” is about to get a lot busier and more visually cluttered. Zynga appears to believe the potential revenue bump will more than offset any resulting decline in participation if users seek out a more streamlined game with which to while away their solitary hours.
