Zynga is moving fast to snap up one of the most buzzed-about gaming apps since “Angry Birds.” The company said Wednesday it is buying OMGPop, the maker of hit game “Draw Something.”
Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, but rumors say it was around 200 million dollars.
Though it was launched just six weeks ago, Draw Something has already been downloaded over 35 million times. It currently tops both the paid and free app bestseller lists in Apple’s iTunes App Store and Google’s Play store.
The game gives users three doodles to pick from, and they doodle and sketch while other players guess what they’ve drawn, after being given the length of the word and some starting letter. Both the Google and Apple app stores are filled with spirited and joyful testimonials about its addictiveness.
Draw Something is by far the biggest hit from the six-year-old company OMGPop, that has tried and failed several times in the search for a breakout hit. Over one billion drawings have been created in the past week, with more than three thousand new drawings per second at the game’s peak.
“You can go along for three or four years with no success, and then one day you can open the door and crazy things can happen,” said OMGPop CEO Dan Porter the day before the Zynga deal was announced.
Without commenting directly on Zynga, Porter said he would only be interested in being acquired by a company that would let OMGPop keep experimenting.
“We took a real big risk with this game, and we created something that’s very different than any game out there,” said Porter. “For us, it’s ‘who is going to let us keep making out-of-the-box games like that?’ Because that’s what’s interesting.”
In a conference call on Wednesday following the acquisition news, Porter said: “It was clear to me from the beginning that Zynga got what we wanted to do.”
OMGPop is the biggest acquisition yet for Zynga, which likes to buy up promising ventures. Zynga had spent 105 million dollars on those deals over the past two years, it said in a recent regulatory filing.
Zynga is based in San Francisco. OMGPop will remain at its headquarters in New York. Porter said that he plans to stay with the company as general manager of Zynga New York and looks forward to turning New York into “a new hotbed” for casual mobile gaming.