UK-listed online gaming operator Gaming Realms has boosted its social gaming business with the acquisition of RealNetworks’ social casino brand Slingo.
The deal will see Gaming Realms acquire the Slingo brand and patents, as well as the US and Canadian development studios of RealNetworks’ GameHouse division, plus its social and mobile publishing network.
Gaming Realms also gets the Soduko.com and Mahjong.com online domains, the entire issued share capital of social casino studio Backstage Technologies, a short-term license to the GameHouse brand and a perpetual license to the GameHouse Promotion Network.
In exchange, RealNetworks will receive a total consideration of $18m, with $10m in cash upon completion of the transaction, which expects to be done sometime in Q3. Two additional payments of $4m will be payable on the first and second anniversaries of the deal’s consummation. RealNetworks has the option of taking up to 50% of the latter two payments in Gaming Realms stock.
RealNetworks president Atul Ball said his company remains committed to its traditional casual games business. While around 60 RealNetworks employees will soon be drawing a Gaming Realms paycheck, Ball said the transaction would have no effect on RealNetworks’ Delicious casual games franchise and its Eindhoven-headquartered team.
ROCKYOU ACQUIRES MAVENHUT’S SOCIAL CASINO SOLITAIRE GAMES
In other social casino acquisition news, San Francisco-based gamers RockYou announced this week that they had acquired two solitaire games from Ireland-based developers MavenHut. RockYou didn’t disclose the price it paid for the Solitaire Arena and Solitaire 3 Arena multiplayer games, which are available on Android, iOS and Facebook.
RockYou CEO Lisa Marino told GamesBeat that the deal expanded RockYou’s daily active user base by over 2m players and doubled its daily active reach in the US social casino market. MavenHut CEO Bobby Voicu issued a statement saying his company was looking to “transition our focus on developing new titles.” Solitaire Arena debuted on Facebook way back in 2012 and Voicu took solace in knowing that RockYou was enabling “these classics to live on.”
