Take-Two completes its massive Zynga acquisition

By Cristina Alexander Published May 23, 2022

Take-Two Interactive, the video game publisher that owns Rockstar, 2K, and Private Division, has completed its acquisition of Zynga, the mobile game developer behind the popular Facebook game FarmVille.

On January 10, Take-Two announced it was going to acquire Zynga for $12.7 billion in its effort to expand to the mobile gaming market. On Monday, the company closed the deal without a hitch, successfully merging its gaming library with Zynga’s entire library of mobile games that have been downloaded more than 4 billion times, including FarmVille and Words with Friends.

Recommended Videos

Strauss Zelnick, CEO and chairman of Take-Two, said the merger was vital for the company to add mobile gaming to its portfolio in order and to generate more revenue with Zynga’s expertise. “As we bring together our exceptional talent, exciting pipelines of games, and industry-leading technologies and capabilities, we believe that we can take our portfolio to another level of creativity, innovation, and quality,” he said in a press release.

Frank Gibeau, CEO of Zynga, concurred with Zelnick’s sentiment: “We are excited for Zynga’s next-generation mobile platform, free-to-play expertise, diverse offering of games, and incredible team to join the Take-Two family. We are eager to continue building an unparalleled portfolio of games that will reach broader markets and lead to continued growth for this next chapter of Zynga’s history.”

At the time Take-Two announced its plans to buy Zynga, it was considered the most expensive deal in the gaming industry. However, Microsoft dropped a bombshell one week later with its plans to purchase Activision Blizzard for $68.7 billion, which was purely coincidental considering the controversial circumstances surrounding such a deal.

Per the terms of the agreement, Zynga stockholders received $3.50 in cash and 0.0406 of Take-Two common stock per share of Zynga common stock. Shareholders voted to approve the deal on Thursday.

Topics

Cristina Alexander

Former Digital Trends Contributor

Cristina Alexander is a gaming and mobile writer at Digital Trends. She blends fair coverage of games industry topics that…

Gaming

Video game voice actors are poised for a strike after successful SAG-AFTRA vote

The Last of Us 2 Ellie Gun

Hollywood is currently in the middle of a significant actors strike, and the same could potentially happen soon in the video game industry as well. SAG-AFTRA members voted to authorize a game actors strike, setting the stage for a potential disruption in the industry if current negotiations with publishers don't go according to plan.

The SAG-AFTRA union represents actors across all entertainment mediums, but the strike that's been active since July excluded the game industry. The game industry's separate contract with the actors' union is almost up, so SAG-AFTRA is in the heat of negotiations with companies like Activision Blizzard, Take-Two Interactive, and WB Games to create a better contract for its workers. If those negotiations fail, video game actors can go on strike to disrupt the game industry for failing to adequately meet their demands. A strike like that needs to be authorized by a majority of the union's members, though; thankfully for SAG-AFTRA, internal support was overwhelming.
A total of 34,687 SAG-AFTRA members cast ballots in a vote to authorize a strike, and 98.32% of them supported a strike authorization, according to a SAG-AFTRA press release. This doesn't mean video game actors are now on strike, just that they're willing to go on one if negotiations fail. SAG-AFTRA says these game studios "have refused to offer acceptable terms on some of the issues most critical to our members, including wages that keep up with inflation, protections around exploitative uses of artificial intelligence, and basic safety precautions," which is why a strike was organized.
SAG-AFTRA and these video game companies are in bargaining sessions between today and September 28, so we'll soon see what impact this successful strike authorization vote will have on the video game industry.

Gaming

The next game from the Outriders studio loses Take-Two as its publisher

Outriders

Outriders developer People Can Fly and publisher Take-Two Interactive have parted ways with each other on Project Dagger, a new action-adventure game. The game has been in development for the past two years. People Can Fly will also retain the rights to Project Dagger and will continue working on it. Whether the game will find another publisher or be self-published is up in the air right now.

"I assume we will part on good terms, and I don’t see reasons why we couldn’t work with Take-Two on some other project in the future," says People Can Fly Ceo Sebastian Wojciechowski in a statement.

Gaming

Microsoft’s Activision Blizzard acquisition just hit another hurdle in the U.K.

Microsoft's nearly $70 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard is under review internationally, and no country takes this matter more seriously than the United Kingdom. The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) completed the first phase of its investigation into the deal and is now recommending putting it through a second phase.

The call for extra scrutiny into the deal between Microsoft and Activision Blizzard stems from the CMA's concern that such a deal may substantially stifle competition in the U.K.'s gaming market. Specifically, it's worried that if and when the merger goes through, Microsoft may make Activision Blizzard's portfolio of games exclusive to Xbox consoles, or make them available on PlayStation and Nintendo systems "on worse terms." It's also concerned that the company may leverage Activision Blizzard's games across console, PC, and cloud systems to harm competition in the growing cloud gaming space.