Playdom has raised $43 million to date and made six acquisitions, including Acclaim Games, and has just announced their intentions to expand into Europe. They plan to create localized versions of their game titles such as Mobsters, Tiki Resorts and Big City Life in French, Italian, German and Spanish by the end of this year.
The first game to be localized is Bola, the 41st most popular application on Facebook according to analytics firm AppData. In aggregate, Playdom has more than 38 million monthly active users (MAU) and is headquarters down the street from Google in Mountain View, with studios in Francisco, Calif.; Seattle, Wash.; Eugene, Ore.; Chapel Hill, NC; Buenos Aires, Argentina and in South Asia.
Zynga has 50 games with over 8 games with 1 million or more daily active users (DAU) and 11 ames with 1 million or more MAU. By comparison, Playdom only has 22 games and 1 game with 1 million or more DAU and 9 games with 1 million or more MAU. So putting an emphasis on European and international users may be the right strategy to grow their reach and compete with Zynga.
Here’s an interesting point, in the last 29 days Zynga lost 7 million DAU according to AppData, which is more than 8x the size of Playdom’s total DAU. So the question is, how much of an impact can this expansion into Europe really have for Playdom? We’ll see.
