Facebook acquires Spanish cloud gaming company PlayGiga, which offers services across Europe, including Italy, Argentina, and Spain. The purchase was confirmed by Facebook to CNBC, following reports last week that claimed the deal was close valued at around $78 million.
IN a tweet confirming the news, Facebook Gaming’s official twitter account tweeted, “We’re thrilled to welcome @PlayGigaOficial to the Facebook Gaming team. We’ll decline further comment for now.” A message on PlayGiga’s site reads the team is “moving on to something new” but confirmed to The Verge they will continue working on cloud gaming.
Facebook’s deal comes as the cloud gaming industry is growing. Google launched Stadia service, while Microsoft is working on xCloud platform. Sony has a cloud gaming service out now called Playstation Now, which has been available for a few years now.
PlayGiga is a far smaller cloud gaming company, but before the acquisition, the company had plans to expand. Variety explains that it was previously planning a launch in the Middle East and explored offering its 300 game library in Sweden, Austria, the Netherlands, and Guatemala. There is no report on whether or not Facebook will use the business deal to launch a gaming service of their own. Facebook is presumably in a better position to build a streaming gaming company after acquiring PlayGiga.
Facebook has focused its attention on the gaming industry. Last March 2019, the social media company added a “Gaming” section to their menu bar, which brought live-streaming to the platform, as well as a collection of games. Mark Zuckerberg‘s company also has an interest in virtual reality gaming since the company acquired Oculus in 2014. The company recently amassed over 700 million of its users to visit Facebook’s gaming content each month.