Search outfit Google has written a big cheque to own a fair chunk of the company which makes annoying facebook games such as Mafia Wars and Farmville.
According to TechCrunch, Google has penned a cheque for something between $100 million and $200 million for the social notworking outfit Zynga. Zynga has been raising about half a billion dollars in venture capital. It scored $150 million from Softbank Capital last month and $180 million late last year from Digital Sky Technologies, Tiger Global, Institutional Venture Partners and Andreessen Horowitz.
The investment is “highly strategic”. In otherwords Zynga will be required to put out for the search engine. Techcrunch thinks that the gaming outfit will be the cornerstone of a new Google Games to launch later this year. Zynga’s games give Google Games a solid base of social games to build on and will see it push further into the social notworking scene.
This could be bad news for Paypal. Zynga is supposedly PayPal’s biggest single customer, and Google is looking for ways to make its Google Checkout get a bit more use.
Zynga has been doing well. In the first half of 2010 it banked $350 million and it is projecting at least $1.0 billion in revenue in 2011.
All your mafia wars are belong to Google
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