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Playdom expands with the purchase of Facebook and iPhone studios

Trippert Labs and Green Patch welcomed into the fold

Playdom expands with the purchase of Facebook and iPhone studios
Well that didn't take long.

A couple of days after announcing it had raised $43 million in its first funding round, social gaming company Playdom has announced two studio acquisitions.

Anyone would have thought they'd done the deals ages ago and just announced them at a convenient time...

Still, the two companies underline Playdom's future objectives.

The 50-strong Trippert Labs is an iPhone developer of titles such as Dr. Ito's Brain Training and Blowfish, and also has what's described as "significant Flash expertise".

Its CEO Omar Siddiqui has joined Playdom's management team as vice president of game production.

The other purchase is Facebook developer Green Patch. Its acquisition will increase Playdom's monthly user base on Facebook by more than 30 percent thanks to games such as (Lil) Farm Life, which has over 1 million daily users.

Green Patch's founders, David King and Ashish Dixit, will join Playdom with King becoming executive producer of a new game studio, managing his existing team of 15 game designers and developers. Dixit will take a management role on Playdom's engineering team, under Playdom founder and veep of engineering Ling Xiao.

"Playdom has aggressive plans to expand our social gaming footprint in 2010. With these acquisitions, we are increasing our cross-promotional power and bringing two talented new game studios into the Playdom family," said John Pleasants, Playdom’s CEO.

"The addition of Green Patch and Trippert Labs will significantly enhance our development throughput and help fuel Playdom's new game pipeline."

The terms of the transactions were not disclosed.

Contributing Editor

A Pocket Gamer co-founder, Jon is Contributing Editor at PG.biz which means he acts like a slightly confused uncle who's forgotten where he's left his glasses. As well as letters and cameras, he likes imaginary numbers and legumes.