Another day, another acquisition for Research in Motion (TSX:RIM). RIM’s snatching of Germany’s Scoreloop is the latest of more than a dozen recent acquisitions. According to Paradigm Capital analyst Barry Richards, many of these have addressed “areas of homegrown weakness..”
Founded in 2008 out of Munich, Scoreloop is not a gamer, per se. Rather, the company’s SDK gaming developer toolkit adds what the company refers to as an “extra social ingredient to mobile games”. Scoreloop integrates with existing games to create buddy lists, high scores tables, player challenges as well as virtual goods currencies.
Some game developers were bullish on Scoreloop because of its ability to encourage discovery of new games. The company’s recent partnership with Taiwan’s Spring House Entertainment allowed gamers to browse through friends gaming activity to find new content.
Scoreloop’s history is short but its rise has been rapid. The company had success across Apple’s iOS and Android platforms and was used in popular games such as the iPhones’s Doodle Train, Hungry Shark and Squibble and Android’s Sudoku Brainiak and Pick a Stick. Late last year, the company’s platform was growing at 100,000 new users a day.
And earlier this year, Scoreloop added Microsoft Windows Phone 7, which until that point had encouraged developers to use its own Xbox Live community
In a message released today on the company’s website, Scoreloop CEO Marc Gumpinger was said the BlackBerry platform was the best fit for the SDK toolkit:
“Over the past few months we’ve had the opportunity to become intimately acquainted with the RIM team and their strategy for the BlackBerry platform” he said. “As part of RIM, we’ll be in the unique position to integrate deeply into BlackBerry platforms to take mobile gaming to the next level together. We’ll continue our cross platform approach but you’ll see that our BlackBerry solution we be unparalleled.”
Tyler Lessard, VP Global Alliances & Developer Relations at RIM said the move is part of the Waterloo company’s buildout of its BBM Social Platform.
At press time, shares of Research in Motion were down 2% to $37.32, near a fifty-two week low.
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