Google has made another step in the direction of social networking and gaming with today’s acquisition of SocialDeck. A note left on the mobile game developer’s website announced that “SocialDeck has been acquired and we’ve joined the Google team”.
The acquisition is the third this month and leaves little doubt over Google’s intentions to make a push in the social gaming arena.
According to Inside Social Games’ Chris Morrison, the purchase signals a move to multi-platform support more than solely gaming or social aspirations. Morrison calls SocialDeck “in some ways a fairly standard mobile game developer”, implying that this was not an acquisition of talent for game development.
Google has made big investments in the social and gaming realms over the past month, starting out in late July with a $150 million investment in Zynga, the game developer behind massively popular social games like Farmville and Mafia Wars. In August, the company spent $182 million on Slide, with Slide CEO Max Levchin stating that they would be working “to make Google services socially aware”. It followed the next week with the purchase of Jambool, which last year had created the Social Gold platform for online payments and in-game virtual currency.
According to The Canadian Press, Google Canada spokeswoman Wendy Rozeluk said that SocialDeck would be “a perfect addition to our current team of engineers […] to continue to innovate in the social and mobile web.”
Morrison contends that that “addition” will be based on SocialDeck’s Spark, a “non-game product it offers” that “provides social integration across Blackberry, the iPhone and Facebook.” We would have to agree, as each acquisition has offered a unique contribution, and SocialDeck looks like the piece that makes Google games available on more than just Android-based phones.
