GTA 5 publisher Take-Two completes billion-dollar acquisition of FarmVille maker Zynga

Smartphone game maker Zynga has become part of Take-Two. The $12.7 billion acquisition announced earlier this year has been completed. Take-Two believes that the move will exponentially increase its revenues from mobile games.

After approval of the shareholders the acquisition has been confirmed. Zynga will continue to work on its own mobile games under the Take-Two banner. The company is best known for FarmVille, but also has titles such as CSR Racing, Words With Friends and Zynga Poker in its portfolio.

Take-Two calls the acquisition a “critical step to exponentially increase revenue from smartphone games.” In the past financial year, the publisher already generated 64 percent of its income from ‘recurring expenses’. This concerns, for example, microtransactions in games such as GTA V. Take-Two itself did not yet have any major smartphone games in its portfolio.

Zynga had revenues of $2.78 billion for the past fiscal year. That is not much less than Take-Two’s annual turnover, which amounted to 3.37 billion dollars. Combined sales would be $6.15 billion. That’s closer to EA and Activison-Blizzard’s revenue. Those companies had revenues of $7.5 and $8.8 billion respectively in the past fiscal year.

When Take-Two announced the acquisition early this year, it was the largest announcement in the games industry. A few weeks later, that record was broken with Microsoft’s planned acquisition of Activision-Blizzard for $68.7 billion. However, the acquisition must first be approved by regulators.

Zynga – The Ville