Recently the Viber Messaging App bought Nextpeer that was solely done to add some social features to its gaming portal. Currently, this app (Viber) has got over 600 million active users. The app was acquired by Japanese Rakuten Company last year for $900 million. It has now made its first acquisition that is solely intended to build out its new games business.
Viber paid $9 million for Nextpeer, which is a social gaming startup that has based in Israel. The app offers game developers with an SDK to incorporate some social gaming features in their applications.
According to Rakuten, the SDK and all the other related services will stay online apart from receiving some integration and expansion so as to work with the Viber’s platform. Also all of the Nextpeer employees were to join Viber.
Nextpeer is the first acquisition by Viber. This gaming service was initially introduced at the end of 2014. It later expanded worldwide in mid of February this year. According to Shai Magzimof, the Cofounder, and CEO of Nextpeer, the main vision of this app was to bring social experiences to mobile players. Therefore, they are teaming up with Viber so as to connect players on mobile and as well deliver a very powerful social platform for the developers.
For Viber, the addition of more features and technology to its gaming business makes lots of sense due to a variety of reasons. The first reason is revenue, whereby Viber will end up making a lot of revenue from games due to the in-app purchases. The other reason is expansion of its gaming platform and other similar functionality. Other services from Viber include calls, sharing, locations, doodles, videos, photos, and stickers.