Browser Game Business Model Summary | PlayBBG.com. Six reasons why $250 million for Playfish is a steal – Games Brief. The Internet is awash with rumours that Playfish has been acquired by Electronic Arts for $250 million. That’s a steal for EA if it’s true. When a company that is less than two years old is rumoured to have been sold for a quarter of a billion dollars , you have to sit up and take notice. When the acquiror is EA, a company which has sworn off making acquisitions and which recently argued that the target’s sector – social games – is over-hyped , you have to question the valuation. So I questioned it. Like any good former investment banker (I keep that one quiet these days), I look for evidence that the target market is big and growing. Facebook has over 300 million registered users, and is still growing. Although Playfish has recently been overshadowed by the success of Zynga, it is a phenomenally successful games developer in its own right.
Nevertheless, for fast-growing businesses where eyeballs are a key metric, they can be useful. Playfish has 50 million monthly unique users . Free Browser Games: A Rising Business Model - Lifestyle. BigPoint CEO: Social game company sales values are "crazy" - Blog.games.com. $182 million. $300 million. $563.2 million. These are the kind of numbers that are getting thrown around casually in social gaming acquisitions these days, and they could go even higher, especially if industry-leader Zynga decides tosell out. But are these companies really worth as much as their buyers think they are? As far as BigPoint CEO Heiko Hubertz is concerned, the answer is a definite "No. " In an interview with GamesIndustry.biz the head of the online game publisher expressed extreme skepticism over the amount of money behind some recent high profile buyouts.
Hubertz, for his part, is looking to zig where others are zagging by scooping up what he sees as struggling, undervalued publishers in the traditional console market. Source.