Zynga acquires Music Pets maker Conduit Labs

Zynga has acquired fellow social games developer Conduit Labs, maker of Facebook games Music Pets and Super Dance. However, as a result of the acquisition all of Conduit's Facebook titles have been immediately closed down.

Also effective immediately, the Massachusetts-based company will be rebranded as Zynga Boston, led by Conduit Labs CEO Nabeel Hyatt. The rest of the Conduit Labs team will be "immediately integrated into Zynga's worforce". Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.

Writing on Conduit's website Hyatt admitted the decision to close its existing games was "a tough decision" for the studio. "In order for us to be able to focus our energies on our next product, we decided that we would need to bring Music Pets and Super Dance to a close," he wrote.

"Despite the countless hours we've spent working on them, and last month being our best revenue yet, we failed to make these products commercially successful enough. We had to make the decision to focus on what was working, and we think once you see what we've got next, you'll agree it was the right choice", he added.

Conduit Labs was founded in 2007 and quickly secured $5.5 million in Series A funding. However, after the initial success of its first two games the company saw audience figures begin to dwindle, with Music Pets recently only attracting around 360,000 monthly users.

The acquisition is the latest in a long string of buyouts by Zynga, which now boasts studios in San Francisco, Austin, Baltimore, Bangalore, Beijing and Los Angeles. Zynga also recently announced a joint venture with Japanese telecom SoftBank for the launch of Zynga Japan.

The latter involved a $147 million investment from SoftBank, while recent rumours suggest that Google may have also invested between $100-200 million in Zynga.