Quepasa Acquires Social Dev XtFt For $4M

Latino social network Quepasa has acquired Brazilian developer XtFt Games, owner of the social game developer TechFront, for $4 million dollars. The consideration will include $3.7 million in shares of Quepasa common stock and a $300,000 brokerage fee. TechFront was founded in 2006 and initially developed games for consoles, Web, and mobile. TechFront began developing social games for Orkut in 2010, in partnership with a variety of US-based partners including eGames.

“The addition of TechFront’s talented team provides Quepasa with the means to offer and monetize culturally relevant social games to our Quepasa.com member base and other audience networks, like Orkut and Facebook, and eventually to mobile users across Latin America,” said John C. Abbott, CEO of Quepasa, in a press statement. “As both a publisher of social games and social network, Quepasa will command a greater proportion of the revenues associated with social games on its own platform, while also participating in additional revenues generated on alternative social networks.”

All of the eGames social titles added to Quepasa’s network through their January partnership were developed by TechFront, which says it’s the largest Brazilian game developer across all platforms. Quepasa will put XtFt’s and TechFront’s 41 employees to work designing “culturally relevant” games for Quepasa’s platform as well as other major Latin American social networks. XtFt’s partners have been offered option-based retention packages. Quepasa now serves over 27 million registered users, following astonishing 255% user growth in 2010. In December 2010 alone, Quepasa added 2.2 million new users and drew 16.4 million unique visits.

“Joining forces with Quepasa will afford us immediate access to one of the largest and fastest growing audiences in Latin America in addition to innovative social marketing tools, such as Quepasa’s DSM (Distributed Social Media), to help promote our titles. We expect to gain valuable insights into Quepasa users’ receptivity to our game features and functionality ahead of publishing our titles onto other well-trafficked sites across the region,” said Rafael da Costa, founder and President of TechFront and a partner in XtFt, in a press statement.

Quepasa’s users have logged 184 million page views across its online network since December 2010. This is only one of several steps Quepasa has taken in the past year with an eye toward adding more social games to its network. Quepasa also partnered with Viximo in March 2010 and Moblyng in January 2010. Quepasa has also partnered with Hi-Media Payments’s Allopass service to enable microtransaction purchase of virtual goods in social games available on its platform.

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