Zynga drops $1.8B to acquire Turkey's Peak Games — biggest Turkish startup exit ever
Words With Friends across the Atlantic... Zynga is the social gaming giant behind mobile hits like FarmVille, WWF, and Okey Plus. Okay, if you've never heard of Okey Plus, you probably haven't spent much time in Turkish coffee houses.
- Zynga just dropped a super-charged $1.8B to buy Istanbul-based gaming company, Peak Games — it's the first $1B+ acquisition of a Turkish startup.
- This isn't Zynga's first cruise down the Bosphorus: In 2017, Zynga snatched up Peak's mobile card games division (which includes rummy-style Okey Plus) for $100M.
Spill the Raki... This acquisition is a huge growth opportunity for Zynga and its in-game buying biz (tokens, etc), as well as its smaller advertising biz (those things you accidentally click on mid-game):
- Instant Success: Peak's Toon Blast and Toy Blast titles have more than 12M daily users combined and are among the highest-grossing games in the App Store — Zynga doesn't have to pour time and money into developing a hit-or-miss game (they're already hits).
- Global Reach: Most of Peak's users are outside of Zynga’s home market (the US) — Zynga says cross-selling across Peak's users will boost its total daily users by 60%. Zynga thinks that'll win it a $40M sales boost for the year.
Zynga acquired its way back to relevance... And relevance is all about the "forever franchises" — aka, games that outlive fad-status. After its 2011 IPO, Zynga stock plummeted 80% in its first public year. But the stock has tripled over the past 5 years, because Zynga realized it doesn't have to consistently make popular games to offer popular games. It can buy them — and it's spent nearly $1B on acquisitions since 2017.