Over the last few months, rumors were starting to emerge that Electronic Arts was on the prowl for a new studio to purchase. Indusrty sources were suggesting that the big-time publisher was eyeing the company Playfish, who focuses solely on free social networking games. The titles are free and playable on sites like Facebook.

Both companies inked a deal worth reportedly $275 million in change, and an additional $25 million set aside for equity retention agreements. EA also promised Playfish another $100 million, but only if the company can reach certain milestones before the year 2012.

This might seem like a lot of money, but as the technology grows — social gaming will too. As of now, Playfish has released ten titles, and if you add up all the accounts that play these games — it’ll exceed 60 million ACTIVE ones. Not only that, every month there are over one billion sessions played. Those numbers can make the EA a lot of cheese in the future, if done right of course. It should also help EA become the leader for games in the social networking world. Which is something that EA obviously now plans to invest in and believes the genre’s future is bright.

via: joystiq