Magic Playdom

If anyone harboured doubts about how important social gaming is becoming - and how quickly it is growing into that importance - then this week's acquisition of Playdom by Disney should put an end to them. The media giant is paying out around three quarters of a billion dollars for Playdom - a figure made only more astonishing by the fact that the company is by no means the largest provider of games on Facebook.

Playdom is no minnow, of course, but then again, it's hard to work out how we should be estimating company sizes or even valuations in this brave new world. I'd be stunned if someone paid the best part of a billion dollars for a traditional game publisher whose games I'd never heard of or played, yet that's exactly the status of Playdom. Like most people who follow social gaming, I was aware of the company itself, but I'd never actually encountered any of the games it makes, eclipsed as they are by the success of titles from rival firms such as Zynga and Playfish.

That probably doesn't bother the company's new owners very much, however. Disney's acquisition of Playdom is unlikely to have had much to do with a particular desire to add the firm's IPs, such as Mobsters and Sorority Life, to its own library. Instead, this expensive investment was motivated by two key factors.

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