Zynga buys 12 companies for fraction of what Disney spent on Playdom

Has Disney been shopping in the wrong places? VentureBeat reports that Zynga spent a total of $123 million in cash and stock for 12 companies over the past year.

That number is about a seventh of what Disney paid--around $763 million--for a single company, Playdom. Not to mention that it's a third of what EA paid for Playfish in 2009: around $400 million.

Of course, Zynga has bought considerably smaller companies, but it's also a sign that Zynga has been far more savvy in its purchases (and its uses for them) than its competitors. The most it paid for a studio was $53 million for Newtoy, the creators of Words with Friends and now Hanging with Friends under the big red dog.

Zynga just filed for IPO last week, valuing the company at nearly $20 billion, which is far more than the two most valuable gaming companies in the world, EA and Activision Blizzard. These small time purchases-turned-big time hit machines is surely a lynch pin in Zynga's strategy--though snagging a few major league execs helps, too. Perhaps the competition should consider going small instead of, say, eying up PopCap for $1 billion.

[Image Credit: Mashable]

Do you think Zynga's strategy for acquiring companies is more sound than the competitions? How do you think EA and Disney will respond to Zynga's IPO?

Zynga Unleashed: Dream Zoo for iOS, three HTML5 games confirmed

Seriously, who doesn't a cherry giraffe with lemon swirls? During its Unleashed news event today, Zynga's mobile head David Ko announced Dream Zoo for iOS devices, a brand new mobile game that's surprisingly not part of the rampant 'Ville' franchise. Dream Zoo is the company's first zoo-themed game in which players to maintain their own zoo and head out on safaris to find new species of weird critters.

According to the game's release trailer on Facebook, there will be over 1,000 animals to collect in Dream Zoo at launch, and players will be able to breed "champion" animals ... whatever that means. It appears that the game will at least allow players to feed and clean their friends' animals, but nothing more of the social features within Dream Zoo have been revealed. Of course, no pricing or release date has been announced yet. (Not even the studio working on the game has been mentioned.)

Zynga also confirmed that FarmVille Express, Words With Friends and Zynga Poker are available on Facebook through the mobile browser. Powered by HTML5, a relatively new web-development tool, the three games can be accessed through either of Facebook's mobile apps or through the mobile web version of the social network. Just in case there was any doubt, Zynga wrote in the announcement on the company blog, "To be clear, we're serious about mobile, and zoos."

[Source Zynga (Twitter); Zynga (Blog)]

Are you excited by Dream Zoo or the new HTML5 Zynga games at all? Which direction do you think Zynga should focus more on, or do you agree with its seemingly balanced approach?