At this rate, Yahoo is gonna be clean out of cash as it has made yet another acquisition.
As first spotted by TechCrunch, the target this time is gaming platform PlayerScale, which provides backend services for game-developers via its Player.IO product. Unlike other recent acquisitions, the good news for gamers here is that PlayerScale is staying put – it’s not being shuttered by Yahoo.
In the announcement message today, Chief Executive Jesper Jensen calls the acquisition the “the next big step toward our goal of building the best possible gaming infrastructure platform.”
He says:
“Don’t worry, we’re not going anywhere. Our platform will continue to support the same great games that you love playing today … and in fact, it will only get better from here!
Our goal has always been to help developers build the best possible games, without having to worry about building and scaling the infrastructure required to operate today’s biggest successes. In working with the folks at Yahoo!, it has become clear that we share this passion.”
PlayerScale’s technology provides the infrastructure for developers to easily integrate payment systems and other key social and data-based features into their games.
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Acquisition spree
This news comes just a few days after Yahoo snapped up Tumblr for $1.1 billion but, although Tumblr will continue to exist for its millions of users, the same can’t be said for it myriad of other recent acquisitions.
Yahoo recently snapped up to-do list app Astrid, which was preceded by personalized recommendation startup Jybe, as well as news summary app Summly. Then, earlier this month, GoPollGo was bought and closed, as was MileWise on the same day.
PlayerScale was founded in 2011, and today it claims to power 4,000 games, built by 2,600 developers and played by more than 150 million people, with 400,000 new users jumping on board each day.
“In the last four months alone, we have increased our daily user growth rate by almost sixty percent,” says Jespen. “With Yahoo’s backing, we can crank out awesome products and improvements to our platform faster than ever before. We will continue to support our existing product and deliver new services to help you grow and manage your success in cross-platform gaming — whether it’s casual, social or mobile.”
There’s no word yet on how much Yahoo is paying for PlayerScale, or indeed how it will leverage its technology, but online and mobile gaming is big businesses, and Yahoo is continuing its push to reinvent itself as a digital powerhouse through placing its proverbial fingers in multiple content pies, including news, travel, blogging and gaming.
Yahoo already offers a gaming portal of its own, so it would make sense that it would be looking to open up its platform to make it even easier for developers to build money-making games for Yahoo’s growing range of online and mobile products.
Feature Image Credit – Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
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