针对迪士尼与社交游戏公司playdom高达5亿6300万美元的并购案，华尔街日报专访了playdom的投资方之一光速创投合伙人Jeremy Liew。

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社交游戏成为资本热门之后，领头羊zynga看起来被并购的可能性不高（估值高达50亿美元），因此在社交游戏界具有相当影响力的playdom自然成为行业并购关注的焦点。

playdom在面对迪士尼的并购邀请时尚很难拒绝的，这对于playdom扩大影响也是一个相当不错的机会，此桩并购能够和迪士尼实现双赢，迪士尼实现了战略布局，而作为投资者则获得了不菲的回报。

而在传媒巨头和传统游戏行业纷纷进军社交游戏的现在，接下来更多的并购案是可能发生的，不仅仅是在大型的企业之间，也可能是并购一些充满天才开发者的小型团队。而在并购之后有些看起来不足以挑战zynga的公司获得了更多的资源支持可能就能够向zynga发起挑战了。

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Walt Disney Co.’s $563 million deal to acquire two-year-old Playdom Inc.  was the latest big exit in the hot social-gaming space, which is still relatively new considering Facebook launched its third-party platform only in May 2007. The deal follows Electronic Arts Inc.’s acquisition of Playdom rival Playfish Inc. for at least $300 million in November.

We caught up with Jeremy Liew, a partner with Playdom investor Lightspeed Venture Partners, to talk about the Disney deal and what he sees happening in this game of musical chairs.

Q. Why was there so much interest in Playdom?
A. At the end of the day Zynga is not really viable, so who else is out there at the top of everybody’s list? Playdom. It’s generated a lot of interest from a lot of people. Disney stepped up.

Q. You mean Zynga—the largest player in the space and reported to be valued at upwards of $5 billion–is essentially too large now to be acquired? (Zynga is reported by The Wall Street Journal to be in talks with Google about a partnership for a new Google social network.)

[Zynga's] valuation is pretty high, which makes them a difficult company to acquire for a lot who would be interested. That’s not to say it’s not worth it–it’s an incredible company. It just means there’s not very many who could afford them.

Q. This was an extremely quick venture exit, even within consumer Internet. How did your firm make out in the deal?
A. Disney made an offer and made a really compelling offer and it was hard to refuse. It wasn’t like we sat around and said we’re going to sell the company. It was opportunistic. Disney wanted it a lot and made it clear it was a strategic thing for them. [For us], we made money and made money fast.

Q. With these big media and entertainment companies seeking to get in on social gaming, do you expect to see more consolidation in the industry?
A. Probably. Other media and gaming companies want to think about what their play is as well. This is a game of musical chairs and there’s probably more people than chairs. You’ll probably see more (consolidation) in this space–big companies but also smaller companies as well, for team and talent, not just scale and revenue.

Q. So despite the strength of “the big three”–Zynga, Playdom and Playfish–there’s still opportunity for start-ups and investors in social gaming?
A. There will continue to be a lot of interest in this space. There’s plenty of interesting companies–though not Zynga-scale. There’s Rockyou, which is one of our portfolio companies. There’s Crowdstar (the fourth-largest social game developer on Facebook), Watercooler, Slide. They’re all out there building games for this market.

Q. What attracted you to Playdom when you made the investment, way back in October?
A. Its real focus on revenue and business model from early on is part of what attracted me. And it was a scrappy and bootstrapped business. Then when John Pleasants (former chief operating officer at Electronic Arts Inc.) joined the company he really took the business to a whole new step upwards.

I’ve known him since we worked at CitySearch 15 years ago. He’s terrific and really scaled up the business. He’s built up a lot more in terms of studios internationally and acquisitions. He’s set up the company strategically to really be a force to increase its scale and scope.