Zynga Buys Music Pets Developer Conduit Labs
In its fifth acquisition of the year, Zynga has bought Conduit Labs, the developer of Super Dance and Music Pets. Fittingly, Conduit will become Zynga’s fifth American office, taking the name Zynga Boston.
The Conduit acquisition looks quite similar to Zynga’s buyout of Challenge Games in June, with that company being renamed Zynga Austin. Challenge, like Conduit, started with good prospects and interesting ideas, but didn’t produce any huge hits on Facebook.
It’s fairly clear that Zynga bought Challenge for its talent, not its games. In less than two months, Challenge’s games have declined precipitously; its biggest, Warstorm, went from 560,170 monthly active users on June 2nd to 152,261 today.
Conduit may have been anticipating this acquisition for a while. Its first effort, the music site Loudcrowd, was shut down on July 29th, according to its homepage. Music Pets has evidently received little promotion, already having fallen from an April high of 1.2 million users
to 362,053 today. That title was also the last released by Conduit, all the way back in February. [Update: Conduit writes on its company blog that both Music Pets and Super Dance will be shut down.]
However, it seems unlikely that all of Conduit’s efforts to date will go to waste. The company’s games stood out for their music-focused design, which incorporated licensed content from some some of the biggest names in pop.
Licensing music from the record majors isn’t easy, but Conduit put special effort into hiring former music industry execs and building connections. The company also has several designers who worked on Rock Band.
Could Zynga use this talent? You bet. While Conduit’s titles didn’t become particularly large, Zynga won’t have missed the example of Nightclub City, another music-heavy game, which was built by MyTown creator Booyah. That game has now reached 6.5 million monthly active users, growth that CEO Keith Lee told us came more from word of mouth between music fans than advertising.
Zynga’s pace of new releases this year has been molasses slow, with only FrontierVille, Treasure Isle, and the ill-fated Poker Blitz appearing since January. But we’re fairly certain that it won’t have its new studios sitting on their hands, either.
One more interesting detail about Conduit: its CEO, Nabeel Hyatt, founded [ed.: correction, see comments below] was a founding member of a cross-promotion effort for small social game developers called Applifier this May. We hear that Applifier has become quite successful — so much so that Hyatt relinquished his leadership role to Jussi Laakkonen, another founder and now CEO, a couple months ago. Hyatt could also bring some interesting perspective on promotion to Zynga.
Before Playdom was bought by Disney, we got into the habit of listing out its previous acquisitions each time it made a new one, to help keep track. Here’s the 2010 list for Zynga, excluding Conduit:
For the Conduit Labs acquisition, the investors were Charles River Ventures, Prism VentureWorks, and possibly other, unknown investors. Conduit had raised $8.5 million since its founding in 2007.
August 17th, 2010 at 10:57 am
[...] Industry News | Tags: Conduit Labs, Nabeel Hyatt, NE Games SIG, Zynga | Leave a Comment Inside Social Games reports that Cambridge-based Conduit Labs has been acquired by social-games powerhouse Zynga, and will [...]
August 17th, 2010 at 10:57 am
Zynga released Treasure Isle in April.
August 17th, 2010 at 11:20 am
Nabeel did not found Applifier or recruit a CEO. Jussi Laakkonen is the founder and remains CEO — my understanding is that Nabeel is an important partner and perhaps co-founder (I believe Conduit was working on something similar, but decided to throw in with applifier instead), but your current text should be corrected.
August 17th, 2010 at 12:19 pm
Actually, Daniel you are incorrect.
Nabeel Hyatt is the current Founder and CEO of Conduit Labs. According to the crunchbase profile of himself and the company:
1. http://www.crunchbase.com/person/nabeel-hyatt
2. http://www.crunchbase.com/company/conduitlabs
August 17th, 2010 at 12:32 pm
Matt, you are quite correct — updated with a link to our past coverage of Treasure Isle.
Daniel and Ryan, we’ll respond in more detail on that point shortly. For now, here’s a link to our previous coverage of Applifer:
http://www.insidesocialgames.com/2010/05/06/facebook-developer-consortium-launches-applifier-the-rebel-alliance-of-cross-promotion/
August 17th, 2010 at 11:46 pm
Eric,
Nabeel had a major role during the early days of Applifier and he remains a good friend. Conduit has announced in their blog that Music Pets and Super Dance will be shutting down, so those games will leave Applifier.
This deal was about Conduit and has no impact on Applifier.
August 22nd, 2010 at 7:01 am
[...] Zynga Buys Music Pets Developer Conduit Labs [...]
August 26th, 2010 at 10:39 am
[...] Sivak – After Zynga’s purchase of Conduit Labs, the former Gameplay Engineer, Sivak, joins Zynga as a new Product [...]
September 9th, 2010 at 11:02 am
[...] Sterling Reames – Zynga gains a new Animator in the form of Reames, who filled the same role at the recently acquired Conduit Labs. [...]
October 14th, 2010 at 12:32 pm
[...] Newton — Some internal changes stemming from the Conduit Labs acquisition as Newton becomes a Senior Graphic Designer under Zynga. At Conduit Labs, he was a Senior UI/Flash [...]
March 18th, 2011 at 11:04 am
[...] casual, mobile and social games. The team will be joining Zynga Boston — a studio that was formed last August around acquired social music game developer Conduit Labs. Zynga isn’t telling us much more about what the combined teams will be working on. [...]
April 19th, 2011 at 5:14 pm
[...] we know this isn’t the company’s first talent acquisition of a music game developer. Last August, Zynga bought Music Pets developer Conduit and turned them into Zynga Boston, which also added [...]
August 30th, 2011 at 12:43 pm
[...] by RockYou. Adventure World is the first to come from Zynga Boston, the studio formed following the Conduit Labs acquisition back in August 2010. That studio has expanded via acquisition in the last year to include Floodgate [...]