Four weeks ago, only people who follow and play social games pretty closely had heard of New-York-based developer OMGPOP. Today, over 35 million people have downloaded the company’s asynchronous art-guessing game Draw Something, and the company has attracted a Zynga buyout offer that AllThingsD is reporting is worth more than $200 million.
OMGPOP has been around since 2006, creating 35 other social games first on its own social network and then on Facebook and mobile platforms. But today’s sale seems designed to strike while the company is incredibly hot with Draw Something‘s meteoric success—the game generated 1 billion drawings across 84 languages in the last week, a peak of 3,000 per second.
Draw Something‘s quick rise is a bit hard to decipher, considering that countless other Pictionary-style games have failed to catch fire on iOS and Facebook, including many with much deeper gameplay and features than OMGPOP’s extremely basic title. It could be that Draw Something‘s simplicity, along with a design that allows for play sessions as short as a minute or two, appeals to players that don’t have time to get fully absorbed in social games. Or maybe it just illustrates the exponential marketing power of having seemingly all of your friends stumble on to a single multiplayer game all at once.
As one anonymous OMGPOP backer told AllThingsD, “No one had any idea that this would take off, and no one knows why it did.” But OMGPOP said during a conference call that the new association with Zynga will let them quickly add new features like chat, photo galleries, and possibly the ability to draw your own profile picture to broaden the game’s appeal even further.
The company also said it currently has “no plans” to change the game’s name to something like Draw With Friends, to match fellow Zynga mobile hit Words With Friends. That game also came to Zynga though a buyout of developer Newtoy in 2010, one of 14 acquisitions the company made in a 12-month period leading up to its IPO last year. At this rate, we wouldn’t be that surprised if, ten years from now, every single major game developer and publisher is just a Zynga subsidiary.
from Ars Technica