RockYou is continuing its acquisition strategy today with the purchase of Australian social game developer 3 Blokes . Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. Founded in 2006, 3 Blokes has developed four social games for Facebook, including their most recent title, Galactic Trader, a space trading and combat game with 200,000 monthly active users. The acquisition also bring RockYou a number of talented and seasoned casual game developers. The studio is led by George Fidler, a former COO of EA’s Asia Pacific Studio. John Passfield, formerly CEO of 3 Blokes and now VP of Creative for the studio, was previously Creative Director at Pandemic’s Australia studio and co-founded Krome Studios. Based in Brisbane, 3 Blokes will operate independently as a RockYou studio and develop strategy and combat-driven Facebook games. It’s interesting see RockYou pursuing a strategy of creating more combat social games on Facebook considering Zynga’s recent launch of its newest combat game, Empires & Allies. And its appears that RockYou, which just brought on a new CEO, has also adopted Zynga’s strategy of acquiring small game studios to build talent and games. Earlier this year, the company bought social game studio Playdemic. I think we can expect more acquisitions coming from the gaming company in the future. RockYou said in the release that it “is expanding its studio system to support top independent developers around the world as it continues to grow their social game portfolio.”
