Germany-based Bigpoint, an online gaming company with a developer team in San Francisco, said that it secured $350 million in a recapitalization financing from TA Associates and Summit Partners, growth equity firms with offices in Boston and Silicon Valley. The deal gives TA and Summit a controlling share of Bigpoint together, with previous shareholder Comcast Interactive Capital’s Peacock Equity Fund selling its holdings and GMT Communications Partners and GE selling a majority of their Bigpoint stake. Bigpoint, which makes the games Battlestar Galactica Online, Farmerama and DarkOrbit, will put the new money toward international expansion

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Dallas-based Bonfire Studios, a maker of popular PC and Xbox 360 games such as Age of Empires and Halo Wars, is the latest game studio to be snapped up by Zynga. The San Francisco maker of online social games announced the acquisition on its blog. “Starting today, Bonfire Studios becomes Zynga Dallas and will be developing original IP for the company,” the announcement said. Bonfire’s founders will stay on, with David Rippy serving as general manager, Bill Jackson as creative director, and Scott Winsett as senior art director.

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Mountain View, CA-based social gaming company Playdom announced yesterday that it has acquired Metaplace, a San Diego-based startup that built social virtual worlds software and introduced two Facebook social games, Island Life and My Vineyard, earlier this year. Metaplace co-founder and CEO John Donham will run Playdom’s new San Diego office, according to the announcement, while co-founder and president Raph Koster and several other staff will move to Playdom’s Mountain View headquarters. As Bruce reported, Metaplace closed its consumer-facing virtual worlds site last December after failing to generate enough business. The terms of this week’s acquisition weren’t disclosed; Metaplace had raised at least $9.4 million from a group of investors that included Charles River Ventures, Crescendo Ventures, Marc Andreessen, and Ben Horowitz.

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This week has been surprisingly quiet for Seattle-area gaming companies, even though the annual Game Developers Conference is going on in San Francisco. Well, OK, Kelly Ripa plugged PopCap’s flagship game, Bejeweled, on “Live with Regis and Kelly”—but does that really count?

Here’s some more substantial news. Redmond, WA-based WildTangent, one of the elder statesmen of the local gaming scene, announced today its new advertising platform, called BrandBoost, is being used by Playdom in its popular Facebook game, Tiki Farm. Playdom, a social game developer based in Mountain View, CA, has other Seattle-area connections as well. Last week, the company acquired Bellevue, WA-based Offbeat Creations for an undisclosed price and is merging the startup with Playdom’s existing Seattle studio.

The deal provides some validation for WildTangent’s advertising model, which it has been pursuing for a couple of years now. The model essentially gives gamers the option of playing for free if they view a 30-second ad—similar to the Hulu advertising model for TV. WildTangent gets a cut of the ad revenues from the game developer; advertising makes up about half of WildTangent’s total revenue. The Playdom deal is the company’s first big placement of its advertising platform in a social game.

Last year, WildTangent’s founder and former CEO Alex St. John gave me a rundown of the company’s efforts in ad-sponsored play. But it sounds like it has progressed quite a bit since then. Sean Sundwall, WildTangent’s director of corporate communications, says revenues for 2009 grew by 40 percent over the previous year, and the company is profitable. He says that other game portals use banner ads, but that most companies haven’t gotten as far as WildTangent in offering ad-sponsored play.

That’s in part because it takes a lot of time and money to make this kind of advertising work in the gaming world. To that end, WildTangent has a sales force of more than 30 people based in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles. They have the experience and credibility to compete for the attention of major brands, Sundwall says.

Looking back over the history of WildTangent, it’s been interesting to watch how it has shifted from developing and publishing games to distributing them and selling ads, and from PC and downloadable games to online games. “We’ve evolved to be where the eyeballs are going,” Sundwall says. Today, that means casual games on Facebook, MySpace, and other social websites.

WildTangent is led by CEO Mike Peronto, a company veteran who has been at the helm for about 18 months. The firm started in 1998 and has raised more than $50 million in venture financing from Madrona Venture Group, Advanced Technology Ventures, Greylock Partners, IDG Ventures, and others.

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It was a crazy busy week for deals in the Northwest. Just when we thought the flow might slow down before the end of summer, we saw tons of activity in software, Internet, mobile, gaming, and materials.

—Bellevue, WA-based Apptio, the IT cost management startup led by CEO Sunny Gupta, raised $14 million in Series B funding from Madrona Venture Group, Greylock Partners, Shasta Ventures, and the Andreessen Horowitz Fund. The money will allow Apptio to aggressively expand its sales and product development. Gupta also had some telling things to say about his company’s culture.

—Seattle-based Impinj has teamed up with Coca-Cola to provide radio frequency identification tags and readers for the soda giant’s new Freestyle drink dispensers. Financial terms were not given. The Impinj technology will allow Coke to track and monitor its dispenser operations and customer preferences in real time.

—Hillsboro, OR-based AISI, maker of a testing system for semiconductor memory manufacturing, closed a Series B financing round worth $11 million, as Eric reported. Investors in this round included OVP Venture Partners, TL Ventures, and Intel Capital.

—Seattle and San Francisco-based Jambool raised $5 million in venture funding, led by Madrona Venture Group. Bay Partners also participated in the financing round. Jambool has developed a micropayments and virtual currency system for social online games.

—Vancouver, WA-based ClearAccess raised about $6 million in Series B funding from Blade Ventures, Buerk Dale Victor, and DFJ Frontier, as Eric reported. ClearAccess provides data services and broadband device management for Internet service providers.

—Kirkland, WA-based OVP Venture Partners led a $14 million Series B financing round for Boston-based Novomer, a green materials startup, as Wade reported. Physic Venture Partners, Flagship Venture Partners, and DSM Venturing also participated in the round.

—Seattle-based iLike is rumored to be bought by MySpace for some $20 million, as Eric reported. The deal could close by the end of this week. Founded in 2002, iLike is an Internet music company that helps people find new music and concerts and create playlists.

—Seattle-based NewPath Networks, a provider of wireless carrier network technologies, announced a new $10 million line of credit from Square 1 Bank. Back in April, NewPath raised $30 million from New York-based Charterhouse Group and Denver-based Meritage Funds. NewPath designs and operates antenna systems for wireless networks.

—Seattle Genetics (NASDAQ: SGEN), a Bothell, WA-based developer of antibody drugs for cancer, raised $136 million in a stock sale, as Luke reported. JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs led the offering. Seattle Genetics is six months ahead of schedule in a pivotal study of its experimental drug for Hodgkin’s disease.

—Seattle-based Z2Live, a mobile social games startup, has raised $3 million from Madrona Venture Group, according to a report in TechCrunch. Z2Live has developed a free, multiplayer platform for social and casual games on the iPhone and iPod Touch.

—Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) and Nokia (NYSE: NOK) announced an alliance that will create adaptations of Microsoft programs, like Office, for Nokia smartphones. Financial terms weren’t given, but the two companies will jointly market the products they create together. Nokia’s Symbian mobile operating system has been a major competitor to Microsoft’s Windows Mobile platform.

—Lastly, we provided some more in-depth analysis of Microsoft’s sale of Seattle-based Razorfish to Publicis for $530 million, from Cascadia Capital’s Warren Gouk, an expert on mergers and Internet strategy. Gouk said Microsoft stands to gain a lot if the deal drives its search and display advertising business, while Razorfish could expand its international market.

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Bellevue, WA-based Coinstar announced today it has formed a partnership with gaming companies including WildTangent, Spare Change, Rixty, and Aeria Games, to sell prepaid online gaming cards at some 500 Cumberland Farms retail locations this summer, and at more retailers later in the year. Financial terms were not given. Coinstar’s (NASDAQ: CSTR) new digital entertainment products will also include prepaid cards for Facebook and MySpace applications.

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Issaquah, WA-based Amazing Society, a game development studio owned by San Mateo, CA-based Gazillion Entertainment, is making a video game based on the Super Hero Squad cartoon, through a partnership between Gazillion and Marvel Entertainment. Gazillion emerged from stealth mode this week, as reported by VentureBeat and Northwest Innovation. Amazing Society is slated to develop two other massively multiplayer online games as well.

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Redmond, WA-based WildTangent, a developer and publisher of online games, has closed its development studio and laid off 20 employees, or one-fifth of its staff, as first reported by TechFlash. Co-founder Alex St. John has stepped down as chief executive but remains chairman, according to Gamasutra and others. Mike Peronto is the new CEO.

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I’m not really a Frank Gehry fan, but I have to say the Gehry-designed Experience Music Project at Seattle Center was the perfect venue for PopCap’s gala last night. The Seattle-based casual game maker was celebrating its new release in its bestselling “Bejeweled” series—Bejeweled Twist—and it pulled out all the stops. If the quality of the food and entertainment were any indication, PopCap is doing very well indeed.

After partaking in kebabs, salmon, and roasted vegetables, the crowd of roughly a hundred gathered in the Sky Church room for an ironically over-the-top presentation and skit, which included a mad professor and six space-age-uniformed female acrobats doing stunts on suspended rings. PopCap chief executive David Roberts took the stage and first addressed the issue of the economic climate. “We planned this event well before the economy started its recent slide,” he said, adding that casual games are as important as ever. “The need for fun in our lives may never be greater than in the next year.” The gaming business has been resilient so far, Roberts said, and PopCap continues to see “record revenues and buy-ins from partners.”

PopCap has been growing in recent years, and now has more than 200 employees worldwide, including offices in Dublin (working on mobile games) and Shanghai (working on multiplayer games and addressing the Chinese market, where the “try and buy” business model used in the U.S. doesn’t fly). From 2003 to 2008, PopCap’s consumer game sales have shot up from $10 million to $170 million. Bejeweled, a puzzle game that involves lining up gems in a grid (a bit like Tetris, to my grizzled eyes), makes up about 40 percent of that revenue.

Founders Brian Fiete, Jason Kapalka, and John Vechey then said a few words and demoed the new game for the audience. Bejeweled Twist, four years in the making, is a variation on the same theme, with a new type of spinning action (you rotate groups of jewels to line them up properly) and some other cool-looking features. It costs about $20 and runs on computers, consoles, and mobile devices (soon the iPhone).

After the presentation, I chatted with Fiete, PopCap’s chief technical officer. He told the story of how he and Vechey had built a multiplayer online game while they were undergrads at Purdue University circa 1997, and how they dropped out of school to join a division of Sierra Online in the Seattle area. Kapalka was already in the game industry, liked their work, and founded PopCap with them in 2000. As for their goals at this point, Fiete says, “We want to be true to our roots. We’re still gamers at heart.” (His personal favorite is the core shooter game Counter-Strike, developed by Bellevue, WA-based Valve.)

Fiete also talked about democratizing casual games—a common theme in the industry. “We want to broaden it out and expand, to try to put Bejeweled or Bejeweled Twist on other devices,” he says. “The goal is to make everyone a video gamer.”

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iPhone, schmy-Phone. While games and other applications developed for Apple’s iPhone have been all the rage for the last few days, there’s another sector worth keeping an eye on: social-network gaming, or games made for online platforms like Facebook, MySpace, and Bebo, which typically need to be played on a desktop or laptop. VentureBeat is reporting today that Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos has invested an undisclosed amount in one of these companies: Palo Alto, CA-based Social Gaming Network, which claims 1.1 million users (mostly on Facebook).

The news comes on the heels of Seattle-based Atomic Moguls—a small company backed by Amazon, Second Avenue Partners, and others—raising an additional $1 million last week. As reported in the Seattle P-I, Atomic Moguls’ games have already been installed by some 1.5 million social-network users, and the company is planning to launch about a thousand new fantasy-sports gaming applications by the end of the summer— variations on the theme of assembling football or soccer players for a team and competing against other teams based on real-world stats.

Meanwhile, Social Gaming Network just raised $15 million in May, and is looking to make money by selling ads, as well as encouraging users to buy virtual goods in its games. Online “casual gaming” is a huge market ($2.25 billion a year in the U.S. alone, according to the Casual Games Association), and it will be interesting to see whether the new crop of games for the iPhone and other mobile devices will pull players away from the more traditional Web-based and social-networking platforms. Or perhaps some sort of hybrid will emerge. I just wish there was more time in the day to try these games… or not.

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