Is Angry Birds Leaving Nest to Join Zynga?

Online gaming company Zynga, popular for its interactive games like Words with Friends and FarmVille, may be setting up to acquire Rovio. Rovio is the creator of Angry Birds, one of the more popular mobile games. In a report last night, AllThingsDigital discussed how the two companies might have already engaged in talks. Back in July, Zynga lost out to Electronic Arts ERTS in a bid to acquire Popcap Games. PopCap is a digital and social gaming company with more than 150 million games played on platforms such as Facebook, RenRen RENN, Google GOOG, iPhone AAPL, iPad and Android. Upon completion of the deal, EA will pay approximately $650 million in cash and $100 million in shares of EA common stock to be issued to certain stockholders of PopCap. In addition, the PopCap sellers are entitled to additional variable cash consideration, contingent upon the achievement of specific non-GAAP earnings before interest and tax performance milestones through December 2013, EA's third fiscal quarter end. Benzinga recently reached out to Zynga on the validity of this rumor. "We are not commenting. Thanks," Adam Isserlis, Director of Corporate Communications at Zynga said. Zynga has roughly 148 million unique visitors on Facebook every month, while Rovio's Angry Birds has surpassed 250 million mobile downloads. A pairing of the two companies may have a huge base of players on both mobile and social platforms. On July 1st, Zynga filed a $1 billion initial public offering. In the filing documents, Zynga states that the company has online game players in 166 countries, and 60,000,000 daily active users accounting for 2,000,000,000 minutes of play per day. On a monthly basis, Zynga sees 232,000,000 active users. "As we look to the future, we believe our core values will be key to our continued growth. Our goal is for everyone at Zynga to be a CEO with accountability and authority to drive important outcomes. It takes inspired people to make inspiring products," Mark Pincus, Founder and CEO of Zynga said in the filing. "We've endeavored to create an environment that fosters intelligent risk-taking in order to invent bold beats—innovations that really advance the social gaming experience for our players. Our company is diverse, creative and entrepreneurial. I often describe Zynga as a confederation of entrepreneurs."