Gaming company Zynga may be acquiring mobile gaming studio Astro Ape.
Business Insider reported that Astro Ape employees have been changing their LinkedIn employment to Zynga as well as their occupations. According to his LinkedIn profile, Astro Ape’s chief executive Chieh Huang is now a director at Zynga. Chief creative officer Christopher Cheung is a Zynga director of engineering, and chief technology officer William Fong is now director of game design.
We contacted a Zynga representative, who said the company had no comment.
Astro Ape’s games include Las Vegas Strip City, Dessert Heros and Office Heroes.
Recently, Zynga stirred the game developer pot with an amendment to its initial public offering filing. The company filed to go public in July. The new disclosure revealed that Facebook was helping Zynga meet growth targets in exchange for 30 percent of Zynga’s virtual goods game revenues.
Zynga has more than 264 million monthly active users on Facebook.
The company has also been busy acquiring. In a little over a year, Zynga on-boarded at least 15 companies including Toronto’s Five Mobile and Newtoy, the Words with Friends creator. In some of the acquisitions, Zynga acquires games that it wants to generate revenues from. Other times, it acquires talented game designers.