EA acquires social network game dev Playfish for $300 million
by Griffin McElroy 
on Nov 9th 2009 11:30AM
As a number of "industry sources"
reported last month, Electronic Arts
has elected to add a new studio to its already expansive roster:
Playfish, a prolific developer of free-to-play casual games on social networking sites like Facebook. The studio was bought out for about $275 million with an additional $25 million set aside for equity retention arrangements. Playfish is also set to receive another $100 million, should it manage to reach unspecified "performance milestones" before 2012.
Not only is that sum of money
much higher than the $250 million total teased by the aforementioned analysts in October, it's ... well, it just seems like
a lot of money to spend on a studio which
actually developed a game called
Bowling Buddies. However, considering Playfish's ten titles register 60 million active users and
one billion play sessions every month, we suppose EA's making a sound investment. The times, dear friends --
they are a-changin'.
