GSN Games buys out social casino app rival Plumbee

move that will further consolidate the social casino gaming industry, Sony’s GSN Games, the social gaming division of Game Show Network, has announced that it has acquired UK rival studio Plumbee.

The move is just the latest in a series of acquisitions for GSN Games, who bought Idle Gaming (the makers of Fresh Deck Poker and Slots of Fun) for $10m in 2015.

“This important acquisition will immediately bolster GSN Games’ ambitious growth plans by leveraging the top talent and social casino expertise of Plumbee to create best-in-class winning experiences for our player,” said Steve Brunell, COO of GSN.

“We are also excited about the expansion of GSN Games into the United Kingdom, where we will look to capitalise on the high concentration of world class gaming talent to supplement our outstanding Plumbee team."

Shoreditch-based Plumbee has 44 employees who will be added to the GSN global workforce, and is best known for its Mirrorball Slots app, which has had more than ten million downloads on social media and mobile devices.

“We are delighted to join GSN Games, a growing force in the social casino space that ranks as a top five publisher worldwide,” Raf Keustermans, CEO of Plumbee, commented as news of the acquisition broke. “We look forward to adding our art, engineering, product management, analytics, and marketing expertise to the existing scale, stability, and talent of GSN Games to create industry-leading social casino experiences.’

According to market analyst Eilers Research, the social casino games business generated $3.3bn in revenue in 2015. The same research concluded that GSN currently has 5.8% of the global social casino games market.