Playdom Announces Acquisition of Metaplace

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., July 8 /PRNewswire/ -- Playdom, a leading social gaming company, announced today it has acquired Metaplace, Inc., a privately held social gaming technology and game design company based in San Diego, California. The terms of the transaction were not disclosed.

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Raph Koster and John Donham founded their virtual world game engine development studio after leaving Sony Online Entertainment in 2006, following their groundbreaking work on such games as Star Wars Galaxies and Everquest II. For the last three years Metaplace has focused on building state-of-the-art virtual world and social gaming technology leading to the launch of the company's first social games "Island Life" and "My Vineyard" in early 2010.

"Playdom is very excited to add the Metaplace game design group to its growing family of game studios," said John Pleasants, Playdom CEO.

"We expect that the Metaplace social game engine will form a key part of our unified back-end technology platform for Playdom's games going forward," added David Sobeski, Playdom CTO. "We think the Metaplace engine is a competitive advantage in that it will take other companies years to duplicate its capabilities which will streamline and quicken our game development cycles."

"We are thrilled to be joining the Playdom family and contributing to their stellar roster of social games with both new titles and technology," said John Donham, CEO of Metaplace. "I look forward to running the Playdom-San Diego office while Raph continues his creative design work with Dan Yue, Playdom Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer, and Jason Hable, Metaplace's VP of Business Operations, moves to Mountain View to oversee Playdom's company-wide Monetization efforts," Donham concluded.

Metaplace is the latest in a long line of acquisitions for Playdom, which have helped propel it to the top tier of the Social Gaming Industry. Metaplace was funded by Marc Andreessen, Ben Horowitz, Crescendo Ventures and Charles River Ventures.

About Playdom

Playdom is committed to bringing people everywhere together through the world's best social games. Playdom is a top game developer on Facebook and MySpace with popular titles including Social City, Sorority Life, Mobsters, Tiki Resort, Treetopia and newly released Verdonia. To date, over 130 million Playdom games have been installed on leading platforms including Facebook, MySpace, iPhone and Hi5. Playdom is headquartered in Mountain View, Calif., with studios in San Francisco and Los Angeles, Calif.; Seattle, Wash.; Eugene, Ore.; Boulder, Colo.; Chapel Hill, N.C.; Buenos Aires, Argentina and in South Asia. For more information about Playdom, please visit www.playdom.com.

SOURCE Playdom