EA Acquires Publisher Chillingo of Angry Birds Fame
It looks like Electronic Arts just slingshot an angry red bird across the landscape and toppled the obstacles between them and Chillingo. I refer, of course, to the extremely famous mobile phone game Angry Birds, a casual puzzle game that involves the flinging of enraged ballistic avians at all manner of fortification and fauna. It appears that the deal went down for less than $20 million.
According to the LA Times’s Company Town blog, an EA spokesperson, Holly Rockwood, confirmed the acquisition but not the amount of the buy.
As games for the iPhone and iPad take off, some traditional game companies are migrating their titles to the iOS platform on those devices. EA has been particularly aggressive on this front, commanding two of the top 10 paid games in iTunes’s App store Wednesday with Scrabble and Boggle.
“By acquiring Chillingo, EA Mobile is increasing its market leadership on the Apple Platform as well as reaffirming its position as the world’s leading wireless entertainment publisher,” EA said in a statement. “This acquisition will combine Chillingo’s expertise in cultivating the ideas of independent developers with EA’s global mobile publishing reach.”
And no kidding on increasing EA’s market leadership. Angry Birds all by itself has been topping the Android charts with over 2 million downloads in two days. Providing glee and delight to many casual mobile gamers as they rain hostile foul down upon puzzling conundrums. The game certainly has become a rocketing sensation and it’s not the only one available from the publisher Chillingo.
The strange part of this acquisition, however, is what it did not include. EA decided not to buy the developer of the Angry Birds, Rovio, as part of their acquisition of Chillingo. However, if the continue to publish their games, perhaps that means that the developers of Angry Birds will be catapulted to EA fame in the near future.
Since you’re here …
… We’d like to tell you about our mission and how you can help us fulfill it. SiliconANGLE Media Inc.’s business model is based on the intrinsic value of the content, not advertising. Unlike many online publications, we don’t have a paywall or run banner advertising, because we want to keep our journalism open, without influence or the need to chase traffic.The journalism, reporting and commentary on SiliconANGLE — along with live, unscripted video from our Silicon Valley studio and globe-trotting video teams at theCUBE — take a lot of hard work, time and money. Keeping the quality high requires the support of sponsors who are aligned with our vision of ad-free journalism content.
If you like the reporting, video interviews and other ad-free content here, please take a moment to check out a sample of the video content supported by our sponsors, tweet your support, and keep coming back to SiliconANGLE.
