"We can confirm that ngmoco has acquired the Lionside team," reads the statement.
"The terms of the agreement are undisclosed. We are very excited to have Lionside join the ngmoco and DeNA family.
"They are working on new products for the Mobage social gaming platform, bringing their passion and experience to our continuously expanding first party development capabilities."
Unconfirmed reports suggest Lionside, the studio behind Facebook social sports releases NBA Legend and Lionside Football, has been acquired by ngmoco.
As well as chatter from unnamed sources picked up by Inside Social Games, co-founder Brandon Barber's profile on Google+ now lists him as "Lionside and ngmoco's marketing and product guy".
Lionside's website is strangely missing in action, while the LinkedIn profiles of VP of business operations Michael McBride and European account manager Kane Curran state the company has been "acquired by ngmoco".
Merging with the moco
Though Lionside is yet to comment, its games have also been pulled from Facebook, suggesting it's not business as usual at the San Francisco studio.
If true, it would represent an interesting purchase for ngmoco itself owned by Japanese social giant DeNA if only because the take up of Lionside's games on Facebook has reportedly been slow.
Lionside's library on the social network pull in less than 30,000 daily active users (DAUs) according to numbers from AppData, suggesting ngmoco is looking to tap up the developer's internal talent, rather than its IP.
[source: Inside Social Games]
