Electronic Arts, one of the world’s top games developer might not be finished with acquisitions in the Social Games space, according to a recent report by Reuters. Electronic Arts, which has popular games like Madden NFL and FIFA soccer to its credit, recently acquired Playfish for around $300 million in 2009.
Playfish is one of the few successful social game developers, whose Facebook based game “Pet Society” has more than 19 million active users. Pet Society, which allows users to have pets, interact with them and buy virtual goods like food items for pets, is currently amongst the 15 most popular Facebook applications.
Electronic Arts Social Media efforts are currently limited to creating marketing tools to promote the developers packaged console based games across social networks. EA’s revenues from console games have been on a downward trajectory lately. This has led to a renewed effort on EA’s part to look for other potential revenue sources.
The acquisition of Playfish would likely open up one such revenue source for the company. Peter Moore, the head of EA sports, while talking to Reuters suggested that the company would be learning to use social communities to help improve its online offerings. According to Moore:
We are learning an awful lot about a very different type of game experience than we are used to doing. We use social networks primarily right now for building marketing tools. We then look at how do we build games, and we will be doing that in conjunction with Playfish.
Moore further commented that they would be on the outlook to buy more social gaming startups like Playfish in 2010. It looks like EA wants to have a sizeable chunk from the Virtual Goods market segment, the biggest revenue source for social games.
