The mob is stretching its tentacles to the old country.
Social game publisher Playdom, whose games include the hit title Mobsters, plans to expand the reach of its social games to Europe by translating them into as many as seven languages. That’s another way to help the company expand rapidly as it races to keep pace with other fast-growing social game rivals.
Mountain View, Calif.-based Playdom has the top maker of social games on MySpace and it has 38 million monthly active users on Facebook, according to AppData. Its top games include Social City, Tiki Resort, Bola, and Mobsters.
The company raised $43 million in funding in November, and last year it hired John Pleasants, the No. 2 executive at Electronic Arts, as its CEO. Since that time, Playdom has been on a tear, acquiring Acclaim Games, Merscom, Three Melons, Green Patch, Trippert Labs and Offbeat Creations. It also invested in Argentina’s MetroGames.
Now the company is ready to take the games of those developers and put them into more markets, said Christa Quarles, chief financial officer, in an interview. By the end of the summer, Playdom expects to translate five or six games.
The company’s first game for Europe is the Facebook football game Bola. The games will be translated into French, Italian, German, Spanish and Russian. Quarles said that with the acquisition of Merscom, which makes games for brands, the company picked up significant internationalization skills. But so far, Playdom has not acquired a game studio in Europe.
Quarles said that the second quarter was tough for Facebook game companies as many saw their traffic drop. But Playdom has been bucking that trend thanks to its launch of Social City, a city simulation game. She also said that growth has started to come back now. Overall, she said she expects Facebook’s user numbers to keep growing, even surpassing Yahoo this year.