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

Smartphone game maker Zynga has become part of Take-Two. The acquisition announced early this year, worth $12.7 billion, has been completed. Take-Two believes it will be able to increase its income from mobile games exponentially with the move.

After approval of the shareholders has the takeover been approved?† Zynga continues 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 publications’. This concerns, for example, microtransactions in games such as GTA V. Take-Two did not yet have large smartphone games in its portfolio.

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

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

Zynga – The Ville