Further to the purchase of Tapulous by Disney, Dean Takahashi of GamesBeat caught up with its CEO and co-founder Bart Decrem to discuss his reasons for the deal.

"The opportunity is very big. You see people lining up in aggressive positions. Ngmoco has raised a lot of money. Booyah has too. Zynga has just launched FarmVille on the iPhone. Electronic Arts and Gameloft are aggressively investing in the iPhone and iOS," Decrem muses.

"As we looked at that landscape, we had to decide what it would take for us to really execute. We realised it would require significantly more resources.

"We spent the last few months talking to potential investors and partners. Along the way, we started talking to Disney. We felt we had a shared vision."

The price is right

Over on TechCrunch, they've been pondering the price of the deal.

Nothing's been formally announced, but talking to multiple sources, a range of between $22 million and $50 million is estimated, with £22 million viewed as being the initial deal with perhaps a further $7 million or so in terms of future performance bonuses.

This seems reasonable, considering Tapulous is one of the hottest social mobile companies at the moment: a fact which would have added multiples to its already solid and profitable business. Back in December 2009, it said was doing around $1 million a month in terms of revenue.

Of course, that sort of money doesn't matter to Disney's bottomline. It's much more interested in the community that the Tap Tap games have build up in terms of their 30 million downloads and over one billion sessions.

[sources: GamesBeat, TechCrunch]