• TechCrunch, Wednesday, May 2, 2012 11:03 AM

Putting Western audiences well within its reach, Japanese gaming giant GREE has plunked down $210 million in cash for mobile game developer Funzio. Funzio, if you’re not familiar, is the company behind popular RPGs (role-playing games) like Crime City, Modern War and Kingdom Age, which together account for more than 20 million downloads on Apple’s iOS, Android or Facebook platforms.

“I had heard a few weeks back that Funzio was in a fundraising process at a $350 million post-money valuation and had also been loosely talking to various buyers in an auction-style process,” writes TechCrunch’s Kim-Mai Cutler. “Apparently, the fundraising efforts helped tip Funzio into a sale, but maybe not at the valuation I had originally heard about.”

To date, the company has raised about $20 million from IDG Ventures and Playdom co-founder Rick Thompson. GREE, meanwhile, is a multibillion dollar mobile gaming giant that is trying to break into Western markets. “Its profit margins put Zynga to shame, but the company is running out of room to grow as its home country becomes saturated,” Cutler notes. As part of that effort, GREE bought gaming network OpenFeint for $104 million last year.

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