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.

Facebook publisher-developer 6waves Lolapps is increasing its presence in Asian markets while curating Chinese-developed games for Western audiences through a series of acquisitions and publishing partnerships.

Late last month, the company announced the acquisition of Smartron5, a Beijing-based social game developer that is only just now launching its first original IP on Chinese social game network Tencent. This increases the total headcount of 6waves Lolapps in the region to over 75 and brings two new games to the company’s portfolio, with the recently-launched Tencent title headed for Facebook and mobile platforms in Q1 of calendar 2012.

6waves Lolapps CEO Rex Ng (pictured) says the acquisition was based on the strength of the Tencent title and its potential to appeal to a Western audience, as well a desire to accelerate mobile development on 6waves Lolapps titles.

“In China there’s a lot of developers quickly adapting to the mobile side of things — iOS stuff, a lot of Android stuff coming out of Beijing,” he tells us. “So it was actually a perfect opportunity for us to go there and fast-track mobile for us. There are not many Chinese language games on iOS yet. I think there’s a lot of opportunity there.”

As a market, China presents social game developers and publishers a challenge as Facebook is banned in the mainland. Tencent dominates the industry in the region, but developers find it difficult to transition to the network due to closed platform restrictions on APIs and other red tape. Chinese developers also find it difficult to transition their games from Tencent and similar Asian social game networks to the West, both because of platform differences on Facebook and iOS and because of different cultural expectations from games.

Even so, 6waves Lolapps has found some success in bringing Chinese language games for Chinese audiences to Facebook — where Ng estimates there are about 1.5 to 2 million potential players. The most recent example Ng points to is mid-core citybuilding and combat game, 胡萊三國 (Hoolai Sanguo). Like many Chinese social games, Hoolai Sanguo is set in the Three Kingdoms era of Chinese history and features player versus player combat. The art style is cutesy in a way that appeals to a broader audience than just the mid- to hardcore players, which may be why it’s one of the top-grossing games on Tencent. Despite its success as a social game in Asia, however, Ng says it would be unwise to localize Hoolai Sanguo in English because the game wouldn’t resonate with a Western audience.

“There are times when we want to look for content that’s purely for the Asian audience,” Ng explains. “A lot of the time, the Chinese culture style of game works really well in Korea or Japan, because the students study the same textbooks and watch the same movies, so they are well aware of the culture. That’s what we look for. These games won’t make it to English and the rest of the world and that’s by design. We don’t try to bring Kingdoms of Camelot to Taiwan and Hong Kong, right?”

With Smartron5, the plan is to guide the developer toward creating casual games for both the Asian and Western market on a individual basis, only sharing games between hemispheres when the cultural nuances suit both audiences or are completely irrelevant due to the genre type (e.g. puzzle games and bubble shooters).

As for tapping into the well-established hardcore gamer audience in the broader Asian market, Ng says the company is exploring more options.

“The midcore stuff is something we just started to look at,” he says. “We feel that there might be other teams, other studios out there that might be more adequate for it. We might actually be looking to do more [merger and acquisition activity] around that.”

According to our AppData traffic tracking service, 6waves Lolapps currently enjoys 32 million monthly active users and 5.4 million daily active users across both its published and developed applications on Facebook.