Social game publisher and developer Peak Games announced the acquisition of Saudi developer Kammelna Games today for an undisclosed sum.

The acquisition deepens Peak’s ties to the Middle East/North Africa (MENA) region where the publisher makes most of its money off hyper-localized social game adaptations — like Komşu Çiftlik, the Turkish language adaptation of TheBroth’s Barn Buddy. In September, the company raised $11.5 million in a second round of funding to acquire two Turkish studios and increase regional operations in South America and Mexico.

The Kammelna buy brings Peak Games into Saudi Arabia — a country which shows a preference for card or board games, similar to what Peak’s audiences in Turkey and the rest of MENA prefer. Speaking to Inside Social Games at our Inside Social Apps conference earlier this month, Peak CSO Rinah Onur explained that Kammelna is a very small studio that made its name with a single card game of the same name. Peak claims that Saudi Arabia sees the highest average revenue per user (ARPU) by region.

Social game developer Kabam announced the acquisition of Fearless Studios this morning, scoring ex-LucasArts developers and Fearless founders Haden Blackman (pictured, left) and Cedrick Collomb (pictured, right) as part of the deal.

Specific terms of the deal were not disclosed. The entire Fearless team now joins the Kabam workforce in its San Francisco office. Kabam CEO Kevin Chou indicates in a press release statement that the team will be introducing 3D technology to Kabam’s games lineup.

“Their skills in game design, emerging technologies and proficiency in making the transition from 2D to 3D on consoles mesh perfectly with Kabam’s strategy,” his statement reads. “We’ll significantly strengthen our industry leadership as the online gaming market transitions to higher fidelity, 3D gameplay with our acquisition of Fearless Studios.”

Kabam’s VP of Brand Marketing and Communications, Ted Simon, clarifies that the team will be introducing streaming 3D to new titles and possibly to existing IP. As for branching out to new platforms, Simon says there are no plans to get into consoles — where Blackman and Collomb have a great deal of experience — but that Kabam is looking to go beyond Facebook and Google+ to international SNS platforms like Hives and VZNet with 3D games.

Fearless Studios was founded in October 2010, not long after Haden Blackman departed LucasArts and just months before the release of The Force Unleashed 2. Though the developer at one point had up to six projects in development, including a horror title, no games were ever released. Simon tells us that Kabam has not picked up the horror project. Fearless Studios last made the news in June 2011, when the developer was quoted in an HP press release, singing the praises of the TouchPad and the webOS platform.

We knew that Zynga bought four companies in Q3 2011, but today the company reveals to Reuters the names of four companies it acquired throughout the end of 2011: GameDoctors, Page44 Studios, HipLogic and AstroApe.

Page44 Studios — acquired in September, according to Zynga’s head of mobile, David Ko — is a bit of a surprise as the San Francisco-based developer is only really known as collaborating with indie darling 2D Boy on hit downloadable game, World of Goo. Zynga also acquired San Francisco-based developer HipLogic around the same time; that developer is best known for its mobile UI platform services.

Read the rest on our sister site, Inside Mobile Apps.

6Waves-Lolapps is going more aggressively into mobile gaming by acquiring Escalation Studios, the gaming company it worked with to publish its two very first iOS games.

Escalation is a bootstrapped, five-year-old company out of Dallas that created Yeti Town and Splode, which 6Waves-Lolapps published last month. Splode Free is a music-and-color puzzle that challenges players’ sense of timing while Yeti Town is a game that’s essentially identical to Spry Fox’s Triple Town. The terms of the deal weren’t disclosed.

“We started negotiating a publishing relationship, and we then realized we wanted to make them part of the family,” says Arjun Sethi, who is now the company’s chief product officer. (He was previously Lolapps’ chief executive before the company merged with 6Waves.)

Sethi tells us even though Escalation had a video gaming pedigree, the studio operated more like a highly iterative mobile-social gaming one.

“They looked like a web services-oriented company,” he says. “They’re not very much like a traditional studio. They get games out from a quality perspective, but they also leverage the data as fast as possible, which is pretty rare.”

At the same time, Escalation was looking for greater distribution and reach. The company had a previous publishing relationship with DeNA’s ngmoco, which released its game Dr. Awesome.

“We realized the 6L guys had most of what we wanted. They had a platform, worldwide distribution and so the conversation got steered away from publishing toward acquisition,” says Escalation’s Marc Tardif. The acquisition brings 6Waves-Lolapps’ headcount to 230 around U.S., Hong Kong, Japan and China.

6Waves-Lolapps is one of the last larger venture-backed social gaming companies to make the leap from Facebook to iOS. Zynga has Dream Zoo, Poker and more, while Crowdstar has Top Girl and Funzio has Crime City and Modern War. Germany’s Wooga also brought Diamond Dash to iOS last year.

This story originally appeared on our sister site, Inside Mobile Apps.

International Game Technology has acquired DoubleDown Casino developer Double Down Interactive for $500 million, made up of $250 million in cash, $85 million in retention payments for the next two years and a $165 million earnout payable over the next three years.

DoubleDown Casino started off in 2010 looking like another pretender to Texas HoldEm Poker’s crown as top casino/gambling-themed game, but rapidly scaled in 2011 to become one of the top games in the genre on Facebook. According to our AppData traffic tracking service, the game currently enjoys 4.7 million monthly active users and 1.3 million daily active users. The developer plans to release a mobile version in a matter of weeks. Read our review of the Facebook version here.

With Facebook potentially allowing real money gambling in certain parts of the world (like in the United Kingdom, where it’s legal), gambling-themed social games like DoubleDown are well-positioned to access a new audience segment that wants to play with real money. Games that already have established audiences may also be able to convert existing players that use only in-game currency to real money players, given that people are more likely to trust a developer they know rather than new social game developers that build games only for real money gambling.

We’ve contacted DoubleDown Interactive for additional information on the acquisition. A conference call is also being held for the media tomorrow morning. We’ll update this story as necessary.

In 2011, Inside Social Games tracked nearly 20 mergers and acquisitions involving Facebook game developers and publishers, with total disclosed purchase prices in excess of $1.7 billion dollars. Here are the biggest M&A stories of the year.

Often the results of these purchases and mergers were observable on AppData, our data tracking service. For instance, some developers enjoyed the cross-promotional and advertising power of their new parent company, while others saw their games sunsetted, as the development teams transitioned to other games within the company’s portfolio. To better contextualize the data, we’ve provided our list in chronological order. Additionally, Zynga has been given its own category, as it made at least eight game-related purchases throughout 2011.

RockYou acquires Playdemic - January

Publisher RockYou purchased UK-based Playdemic, creators of the farming-restaurant sim Gourmet Ranch, for an undisclosed sum right at the beginning of the year. Roughly 10 months later, RockYou sold Playdemic back to the studio’s founders as part of a dramatic restructuring.

In the months leading up to the January 2011 purchase, Gourmet Ranch was attracting MAU in the mid six figure range, and strong engagement rates of between 15 and 25%. In the months after the RockYou’s purchase, MAU grew rapidly, reaching a peak of about 6 million in June before beginning a gradual decline for the rest of the year. In the four weeks before RockYou sold Playdemic back to its founders, Gourmet Ranch saw a jump in growth that took DAU/MAU from 10% to about 26%. This growth continues even now, currently seeing around 30% DAU/MAU from 490,000 MAU. For RockYou’s part, the company has seen growth of about 3.15 million MAU since the November cutbacks, and now has 6.9 million MAU. The company also saw a drop of DAU/MAU during that period, falling from 18% then to 13% as of this week.

Visa acquires PlaySpan for $190 Million – February

Credit card giant Visa purchased game monetization service provider PlaySpan for $190 million in cash toward the beginning of the year. The acquisition is significant in the social games industry as it marked Visa’s entry into the virtual goods market — where PlaySpan facilitated transactions within Facebook and other web game platforms. Though we have no data-driven way to track the influence Visa had on PlaySpan post-acquisition, we do observe that the PlaySpan Marketplace page saw a very sharp spike at the time of the Visa announcement, jumping briefly from 6700 MAU to 23,000, before returning to normal usage levels of between 4000 and 6500 MAU. PlaySpan told us in August that a partnership with Facebook allowed the company’s continued existence on the platform following the mandatory integration of Facebook Credits as the sole currency.

PopCap Games acquires ZipZapPlay – April

Before its own acquisition by EA (see below), casual game publisher PopCap acquired developer ZipZapPlay, developer of the pet game Happy Habitat and the restaurant sim Baking Life, for an undisclosed sum.

As part of the acquisition, Happy Habitat was taken offline. Baking Life, which had about 2.5 million MAU and about 20% DAU/MAU at the time of the acquisition, was placed in “evaluation mode” while PopCap considered whether or not the aging game was worth saving. Though the game continued its slow but steady loss of users that began months before the acquisition, MAU stabilized around October, and DAU/MAU now runs between 22 and 24%.

Harrah’s (Caesars Entertainment Corporation) acquires Playtika $80 Million+ – May & December

Slotomania developer Playtika was first partially acquired by Caesars Entertainment Corporation through its Harrah’s casino brand in May — and then completely bought out in December. The total price of the acquisition is reportedly between $80 and $90 million.

According to our data tracking service AppData, Playtika’s Facebook games — Slotomania, Farkle Pro, and a Chinese-language version of Slotomania — had a total of 2.3 million MAU in the month leading up to May. During that month, the developer gained nearly one million MAU and has enjoyed steady user growth ever since. Currently, Playtika’s overall library has 5.9 million MAU and a DAU/MAU rate of about 25%.

RockYou acquires 3 Blokes – June

RockYou purchased the Australian-based developer for an undisclosed sum, with the stated intention of putting the studio in charge of its strategy and combat titles on Facebook. At the time of the acquisition, 3 Blokes’ four Facebook games had 200,000 total MAU, led by its space-based RPG Galactic Trader (published by 6waves Lolapps) with about 175,000 MAU.

After the developer joined RockYou, its own library of games steadily lost users, and now stands at just 9,520 MAU. Its first game for RockYou, Galactic Allies, launched in September and gained 200,000 MAU before shrinking to its current level of 80,000 MAU and a low engagement rate of under 5% DAU/MAU.

EA acquires PopCap Games for $1.3 Billion – July

EA acquired PopCap Games for $650 million in cash, $100 million in stock, and multi-year earn-outs that would bring the total purchase price to $1.3 billion. The purchase expanded EA’s large library of Facebook games from its social game arm Playfish, such as The Sims Social, and its brand titles such as Scrabble with PopCap’s Facebook hits Bejeweled Blitz and Zuma Blitz.

Since the acquisition, Bejeweled Blitz has very gradually declined from 10.5 million MAU to 8.9 million MAU today, while DAU/MAU has remained very strong throughout, fluctuating between 26% and 34% as of this month. Meanwhile, Zuma Blitz dropped from 6 million MAU in June to 2.3 million MAU now; at the same time, DAU/MAU has increased in that period, rising from 15% to over 25% today. In July, PopCap attempted to launch brand new IP on the platform with Pig Up!, but the title appears to have been abandoned by the developer.

Publisher 6waves merges with developer Lolapps – July

Ravenwood Fair developer Lolapps merged with Ravenwood Fair publisher 6waves in July to form 6waves Lolapps. The newly minted company raised $35 million from Insight Venture Partners and Nexon just one month later and went on to establish a $10 million fund for social and mobile game developers in September. The developer officially entered the mobile market this month by publishing two games from developer Escalation Studios on iOS.

Ravenskye City, a continuation of Lolapps’ Ravenwood Fair launched in October, now enjoys MAU of 4.9 million and very stong DAU/MAU rates over 20%. Since the July acquisition and August funding announcement, the company has seen relatively steady user activity, fluctuating between 12 million and 20 million (both as a developer and publisher), boosted by the October publications of Zombie Island from Vizor Interactive and Airport City from Game Insight. 6waves Lolapps currently enjoys 14.8 million MAU as a developer, and 12 million MAU as a publisher.

ngmoco acquires Lionside – September

Leading mobile game developer and publisher ngmoco (itself bought last year by Japanese mobile giant DeNA) acquired sports game developer Lionside for an undisclosed sum in September. At that time, Lionside had a total of about 375,000 MAU, primarily from its game NBA Legend: Official NBA Game but since, has seen a steady decline to a current level of 70,000 MAU and low engagement below 10%.

6waves Lolapps acquires Smartron5 – October

Four months after its own merger (see above), social game publisher-developer 6waves Lolapps bought Beijing-based social game developer Smartron5 for an undisclosed sum. At the time of the purchase, Smartrong5 was only making games for the China-based social network Tencent, and as of this writing, has no apps on Facebook. As for 6waves Lolapps, the purchase had no discernible impact on its user activity as tracked by AppData. As a publisher, the company now has 11.8 million MAU and 1.8 million DAU.

DeNA acquires Atakama Lab – October

DeNA acquired Chile-based social game studio Atakama Labs, creators of the retro RPG Little Cave Hero, for an undisclosed sum. While this move and ngmoco’s Lionside acquisition suggest DeNA’s commitment to Facebook development, we haven’t seen much movement in the games themselves. Little Cave Hero went into steady decline just before the acquisition and appears to have been sunsetted just after the acquisition.

EA acquires KlickNation for $35 Million – December

EA bought the Superhero City developer for about $35 million, according to Inside Social Game sources, and folded into the social game arm of its BioWare studio. Given the developer’s history and EA’s previous Facebook efforts with BioWare game Dragon Age 2, we expect to see KlickNation producing titles that draw from BioWare’s IP library. KlickNation’s existing roster of Facebook games currently have a total of nearly 400,000 MAU and moderately strong engagement at 15% DAU/MAU.

Zynga acquisitions in 2011

Leading up to its IPO in December, Zynga made a number of game-related purchases through 2011, at least eight of which were publicly announced or confirmed.

In January, Zynga bought Area/Code, developer of CSI: Crime City, for an undisclosed sum. At the time of the purchase, the game had about 2 milllion MAU, with growth trending downward, now standing at about 1 million MAU with relatively high engagement rates between 15 and 19%.

In April, Zynga made a talent acquisition from UK mobile game developer Wonderland Software, using the new hires to create Zynga Mobile UK. Zynga also acquired talent from poker industry service provider MarketZero that month.

In May, Zynga acquired DNA Games, developer of Casino City and other titles. The developer sunsetted all three of its Facebook titles shortly after, despite consistent performance from Casino City.

In August, Zynga is believed to have bought Astro Ape Studios to strengthen its mobile development efforts.

In November, Zynga’s IPO filings revealed the company had spent $20 million acquiring four companies in Q3 2011. Among them was development studio Five Mobile, bought in July and renamed Zynga Toronto. Among the other three are believed to be Astro Ape Studios (see above), with the remaining two unidentified.

Small-but-profitable social network Tagged has acquired ailing social network Hi5, according to a Wall Street Journal report. Tagged CEO Greg Tseng tells the paper that this will double Tagged’s active users from 10 million to 20 million and bring total registered users up to 300 million.

Founded in 2003, Hi5 was touted by comScore as the third most popular social networking behind MySpace and Facebook in 2008. As the market matured over the next three years, both MySpace and Hi5 fell on hard times with developers migrating away from the platforms. Tagged, meanwhile, successfully shifted its business away from directly competing with Facebook — instead, focusing on more intimate social connections between members and “social discovery,” which is something Facebook has recently been trying to improve on its own platform. Tagged also beefed up its social games platform, turning to in-house development to support growth and revenue with virtual goods sales.

With Hi5, Tagged gains both user numbers and more access to audiences in Southeast Asia, South America, and other countries where Hi5 was more popular than Tagged. Tseng didn’t disclose the terms of the acquisition to the Journal, but he did say some Hi5 employees may join the Tagged team. He also says that Tagged is on track for 2011 revenue between $43 million to $45 million — down from the ambitious $50 million he told us earlier this year.

Electronic Arts said it acquired KlickNation to beef up its RPG games on social networks after we broke the news about the deal yesterday. The Sacramento, Calif.-based company will become part of BioWare’s social gaming team.

EA says the studio will focus on role-playing games for social networks and will be led by KlickNation’s chief executive Mark Otero. The terms of the acquisition were not disclosed, but a source tells us that the total price was roughly $35 million, including earnouts and retention bonuses. KlickNation’s games also probably won’t be sunsetted even though they have seen a slight slip in active usage over the past month.

In acquiring KlickNation, EA enters the emerging core gamer market on Facebook, which is currently dominated by strategy combat games like Kixeye’s Backyard Monsters and IGG’s Galaxy Online 2. CrowdStar and RockYou recently joined this market with their own strategy combat titles released in the last three months.

KlickNation is a relatively small developer compared to other studios producing core strategy games. According to our AppData traffic tracking service, the developer at one point enjoyed 1.3 million monthly active users, and saw around 150,000 daily active users at its peak. Today, the developer sees 395,441 monthly active users and 49,022 daily active users.

ETA: Although we’re reasonably certain that EA is working on a companion social game for BioWare property Mass Effect 3, we don’t believe that KlickNation is working on that project. Given the console game’s March 2012 release window, it would be a very tight development cycle for a fully realized companion social game. BioWare also has a back catalog of IP to pull from (Baldur’s Gate, Jade Empire, etc.) to develop all-new social games.

AJ Glasser contributed to this story.

Tapjoy, which works with developers to distribute and monetize their apps, is actively exploring a sale, according to several sources with knowledge of the company’s discussions. Possible candidates include Zynga and the Japanese mobile gaming giants GREE and DeNA.

The company’s chief executive Mihir Shah denied that the company was for sale. “I can’t comment on rumors or speculation.”

He added, “We’re at a level of scale and the market opportunity is so large and we’re so clearly in the lead that there isn’t really any direct viable competitor. We just continue to be focused on building this ridiculously exciting business.”

However, sources familiar with the company’s discussions say it has been actively pursuing talks with strategic acquirers like Zynga, Electronic Arts, GREE and DeNA and that it has been filling out its executive ranks ahead of either a sale or a public offering. The company did hire a chief financial officer in July named Al Wood who had led two companies through the IPO process.

Read the rest on our sister site, Inside Mobile Apps.

Electronic Arts may announce tomorrow that it has bought Age of Champions developer KlickNation, according to sources familiar with the matter. The terms of the deal will likely not be disclosed. KlickNation has around 70 employees and has at least one angel investor, Robert Simon of Ariva Partners.

KlickNation would add a core gamer-focused studio to the two social gaming ones the company currently has in Dragon Age Legends developer EA2D and Playfish. These two studios mainly produce social games related to EA’s existing franchises like Dragon Age, The Sims and FIFA. Playfish also maintains the original intellectual property it created like Restaurant City before it was bought in 2009 for $300 million in cash and stock plus $100 million in earnouts.

In acquiring KlickNation, EA could be entering the emerging core gamer market on Facebook, which is currently dominated by strategy combat games like Kixeye’s Backyard Monsters and IGG’s Galaxy Online 2. CrowdStar and RockYou recently joined this market with their own strategy combat titles released in the last three months.

KlickNation is a relatively small developer compared to other studios producing core strategy games. According to our AppData traffic tracking service, the developer at one point enjoyed 1.3 million monthly active users, and saw around 150,000 daily active users at its peak. Today, the developer sees 395,441 monthly active users and 49,022 daily active users. In the last month, all of its major games — including its newest game, Six Gun Galaxy — have flattened in monthly and daily actives, a sign that KlickNation may be preparing to sunset the games after the acquisition is announced in the same way that DNA Games did when bought by Zynga.

AJ Glasser contributed to this story.