Social gaming is among the fastest growing segments in this particular industry, and Electronics Arts has long ago become a contender to throne – or rather, Zynga’s throne. The company challenged Farmville’s social element  back at the E3 convention and has made a couple of big acquisitions, including the $750 million buyout of PopCap this year. The price tag has been deemed too high by some pundits at the time.

Today’s news is that EA acquired a much smaller social game developer called KlickNation for an undisclosed amount. The company is however operating in Zynga’s home turf, Facebook, which makes it a significant buy nevertheless.

Tricia Duryee gave her perspective:

“…right now the industry is in a talent war, with the leading social games company, Zynga, gobbling up many of the smaller social games studios across the country.

Electronic Arts has made it abundantly clear that it intends to challenge Zynga’s dominance in social gaming. If successful, EA may have a chance to win back some of the attention Zynga has been stealing away from it.”

KlickNation has been working on online roleplaying games the past two years and will be based in operating from Sacramento under a new title -BioWare Social.  Presumably EA decided to integrate KlickNation with the label due to the latter’s sizable portfolio of popular RPGs.

Another factor that’s involved in EA’s latest investment is Zynga’s upcoming IPO and the resulting hype both the companies are trying to tap. Rumors of the date and exact details have been strings for quite some time now,  and Zynga  yet again updated its estimates today. No specific date was mentioned but the game maker said it plans to raise between $850 million and $1.15 billion, bringing its total valuation to nearly $7 billion.