Social gaming has established itself as an important frontier on the web. Google is playing catch up. It is buying the social app company Slide for $182M.
Slide and RockYou were the early leaders in Facebook apps but were overtaken by social gaming companies such as Zynga, PlayFish and Playdom. So this acquisition was not received well by the media. If Google is buying Slide to for their apps and games, I would agree that this is not a very good move. A better move would have been to go aggressively after Playdom which was snapped up by Disney for $562M recently. There are some other good social gaming companies that are better positioned than Slide. I have a feeling this is not about Slide’s games and apps but rather its technology. Google is looking to build a gaming focused social network and this may be a play to get some tech to integrate into that.
In other social gaming news Zynga is buying tokyo based gaming company Unoh.