Zynga buys OMGPOP for a reported $200M

We’ve confirmed that Zynga, the app-studio-eating megalith of social gaming, has acquired OMGPOP, maker of new hit mobile game Draw Something. You know what they say: If you can’t beat ’em, buy ’em.

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Zynga eventually wants “to get one billion people to play together, and with this announcement, we’re getting closer to that goal,” said Zynga’s chief mobile officer David Ko in a call today.

OMGPOP recently created Draw Something, a simple Pictionary-like app that saw skyrocketing stats for adoption within days of its release. As of today, the app shop’s blockbuster game was showing the following stats, which come to VentureBeat courtesy of OMGPOP chief revenue officer Wilson Kriegel:

• 20.5 million daily active users
• 37 million installs
• 3 billion drawings created in the game
• 2,000 drawings per second
• Most tweeted-about game ever

Ko updated those stats today, stating players have created 1 billion drawings in the last week alone.

Draw Something’s growth was so meteoric that it even eclipsed Zynga’s Words With Friends as the top game on the AppData charts late last week. Now, Zynga has snapped up OMPOP for its very own, and All Things D pegs the sale price at $200 million. Officially, both parties declined to discuss the financial terms of the deal.

We first got wind of the rumored acquisition earlier this week. At that time, OMGPOP CEO Dan Porter told VentureBeat, “I’m not in competition with Zynga. Words With Friends is a great game and has stood the test of time. That’s the press angle. My angle is about what makes the game special. You can quote me on it.”

The OMGPOP 40-person team will now be Zynga employees, and Porter will be Zynga’s vice president and general manager of the company’s New York office. Porter said in a call today that having access to Zynga’s war-chest of funds and resources will make it easier to bring a slate of new features to Draw Something quickly. Those resources will also come in handy as the game continues to scale out to tens of millions of users, a unique challenge we discussed in detail with Kriegel last week (watch an exclusive video of that interview).

OMGPOP was founded six years ago and initially focused on web-based gaming. The company’s focus later shifted to Facebook games and is now on mobile games. All told, the startup has raised $17 million in venture capital.

Image courtesy of Losevsky Pavel, Shutterstock

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