Zynga buys NaturalMotion

At a press conference dedicated to the Zynga development strategy for 2014 (about it in a separate article), it became known: Zynga buys the British publisher and developer of mobile games NaturalMotion for $ 527 million.

Zynga will pay most of the amount in cash, another $40 million in its shares, part of which will go to NaturalMotion employees.

What for?

As can be understood from the statement of Don Mattrick, executive director of Zynga, one of the main goals of the purchase was to obtain the NaturalMotion toolkit. Recall that the British are known not only for their games, but also for Morpheme and Euphoria packages, which allow you to create realistic three-dimensional characters. 

Don left Microsft for ZyngaOn the other hand, given the possibility of acquiring these tools under a license, this can hardly be called a really serious reason.

Another thing is much more important – NaturalMotion has the experience of repeating success. Their last four projects (My Horse, CSR Racing, CSR Classic and Clumsy Ninja) are hits (both in terms of downloads and box office figures). 

And this is exactly what Zynga lacks, having risen on the wave of success of the Farmville series, it has not been able to repeat it.

Who!

By the way, this is what fundamentally distinguishes the current purchase of Zynga from the previous ones. By the way, the company still cannot recover from one of them – the acquisition of OMGPOP in 2012 for $ 180 million.  

Do you still remember the story of Draw Something?We are talking about the fact that NaturalMotion is not a studio of one potentially great game, it is a very successful business with a whole line of high–profile IP.

And from this point of view, we can talk about the difference in approaches to purchases on the part of Pinkus and Mattrick, who replaced him in this post in the summer of 2013, who made the Xbox 360 the winner in the war of consoles of the last generation.

Risk?

But the risk, given that Zynga gives NaturalMotion a third of its cache, still remains for Americans.

Zynga delayed porting Farmville 2 to mobile platformsIf the deal does not lead to the emergence of strong projects, Zynga will only have to pray for the mobile Farmville 2.