While last week Zynga's Mark Pincus pondered future acquisitions akin to the recent purchase of Omgpop, the executive said today that major deal was a "rare instance" for his company.
While just last week Zynga CEO Mark Pincus mentioned that he wanted to "aggressively pursue" more companies like the recently acquired Omgpop, the executive took a more cautious stance during a recent earnings call, noting that purchasing the Draw Something studio was a "rare instance" for the social game giant. During the company's financial earnings call on Thursday, Pincus said that the $180 million acquisition of Omgpop only made sense because it fit in perfectly with the Zynga's financial strategy and growing mobile business. "[After Words With Friends,] Draw Something was the second major product line that we went out and acquired. It was a rare instance for us," Pincus said. "We believed it was not just accretive financially, but we were excited about its growth and what this game meant for mobile and social gaming." Pincus added that the Omgpop's Pictionary-inspired app offered a new take on social connectivity and viral growth, making it an unusual resource that offered something completely different than the rest of the Zynga catalog. "We thought it would be synergistic to our network and infrastructure. We thought it would be more valuable to Zynga and that we could organically build from it," Pincus said. Going forward, Pincus said Zynga still plans to take a cautious approach to acquiring other companies, and will only go after new deals if they make sense and augment the company's bottom line. "It does not represent a change in our strategy or our approach to large investments in our data, analytics and hosting infrastructure. At every point, we have been very careful, prudent, and bottom-line oriented to make investments where we could connect the dots to an accretive return,” he said. For more from Zynga's recent first quarter financial results, check out Gamasutra's extended report.
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