Take-Two to Buy Social Game Publisher Zynga for $12.7 Billion

Take-Two Interactive, the publisher behind Grand Theft Auto V (which to this day stands as the most profitable piece of media ever created), has announced their intent to purchase former social media-based game monolith Zynga for approximately $12.7 billion.

Zynga is most well-known for Farmville and Cityville, timer-based games with heavy microtransaction elements that dominated the now-defunct Facebook social game market in the late 2000’s and early 2010s. While those titles and the platform they resided on no longer exist in the same form, Zynga still creates and supports popular casual titles such as Zynga Poker and Words With Friends 2.

Zynga was popular enough to partner with massive toy company Hasbro to create physical products and versions of several of its video game titles in its heyday. However, the company has seen sharp declines in its userbase over the last decade due to the shift in the market from website-based titles to standalone applications. The market is becoming more ambiguous or hostile towards titles that rely on players pestering their friends for assistance. The company also suffered a data breach in 2019 that compromised upwards of 173 million Words With Friends accounts, according to tracking site HaveIBeenPwned?.

As of 2022, Zynga still operates around ten offices worldwide, including in Chicago and Austin in the United States and Bangalore, Toronto, and Dublin internationally.