• TechCrunch, Tuesday, March 20, 2012 12:27 PM

Hungry for its next social-gaming hit, Zynga is reportedly pursuing OMGPOP for somewhere in the neighborhood of $200 million. If you’re not familiar (neither were we), OMGPOP is the company behind Draw Something, a white-hot mobile and Internet game inspired by Pictionary. “It’s my understanding that the talks have not yet entered the more advanced, exclusivity stage because there are still other Japanese buyers like GREE that are interested in the company,” TechCrunch’s Kim-Mai Cutler reports.

If the deal does go through, it would be Zynga’s biggest publicly disclosed acquisition to date. “Zynga’s track record is mostly in acquiring small teams for a talent-price range of $5 to $20 million,” Cutler notes. “But it did make a fantastic deal in late 2010 to buy Words With Friends-maker Newtoy for $53.3 million in cash and stock -- a price that looks positively low in retrospect.” After buying Newtoy, Zynga was able to double Words With Friends’ daily active users in 120 days.

Still, for Zynga, this is a question of buy or build, according to Cutler. “On the one hand, Zynga could launch a competing title … But that means it would come several months late to the market and then split the market with OMGPOP.”

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