Zynga’s quest for world domination continues today, as the social gaming giant acquires the assets of German game engine developer Dextrose AG. Zynga has been growing fast and on an acquisition tear this year, buying up XPD in Beijing, Unoh Games in Tokyo, Conduit Labs in Boston, and Challenge Games in Austin.
Dextrose AG develops a commercial game engine for pluginless browser games. Called “Aves Engine,” the game engine technology allows developers to build any type of web based 2D or 2.5D game using HTML, CSS and JavaScript.
Similar to the nature of the company’s previous acquisitions, the Dextrose AG team will become Zynga Germany (based in Frankfurt). This will be the company’s first engineering presence in Europe (the company has an operational office in Dublin). Joining Zynga from Dextrose AG is co-founder Paul Bakaus, who will become CTO of Zynga Germany. Bakaus is a jQuery core team member, and helped create the user interface framework jQuery UI. Fellow Dextrose founder Rocco Di Leo will become Country Manager at Zynga Germany, responsible for all processes and organization involved in the development of future browser game technology.
Of course, with big profits and armed with a massive war chest (which recently got $150 million larger thanks to Softbank Capital), Zynga has more than enough cash to make these acquisitions. And the company is expanding through a number of high-profile partnerships, including deals with Google, Facebook and Yahoo.