EA Buys Playfish For A Small Fortune

EA has just announced that it acquired Playfish for $275 million dollars. Playfish boasts about 60 million players worldwide, and across 10 different game titles. This is a trend, this is the future. More and more people are on the internet and socializing, and if that market can be broken into, the video game publisher that does that will completely dominate the video game market. 60 million players is alot of active players, i mean World of Warcraft only has about 11 million.

"The industry is undergoing dramatic transformation and joining EA is the ideal opportunity for us to push forward our goals to lead in the social entertainment evolution on a faster and much larger scale," said Kristian Segerstrale, CEO and Co-founder of Playfish.

EA is spear heading this "social entertainment evolution", and the next couple years should be very interesting for gamers. We already see an untapped market and new type of gamer emerging from these sites. How will this affect the gaming universe? XBox Live and PlayStation Home are already incorporating social media networks into their current designs, so it will be interesting to see where those companies go from here.

EA Official announcement here

Playfish Official announcement here

Wall Street Journal Article here