Zynga gets to add a new record to its mantle, but this time it’s only because it bought the company that created it.
The game Draw Something has become the fastest-growing mobile game in history. In a span of only 50 days, the game, originally created by OMGPOP and then acquired by much larger social gaming company Zynga, has reached more than 50 million downloads.
It recently leapfrogged ahead of Angry Birds Space to be the #1 paid app in Apple’s App Store. It was the #1 app before the new Angry Birds game, and was briefly surpassed, but then it jumped right back to the top.
It’s always difficult to guess what the next great big online sensation will be, but Draw Something gained extreme popularity because of its ease of use and the masterful way in which it allowed users to invite friends to play and create a fun, social experience.
Zynga’s purchase of the startup that created the game was $180 million, a very nice lump of cash for a company no one even knew about a couple months ago.
Of course, the 50 million download milestone announcement came with a bunch of other fun statistics. For example, players have created a combined 6 billion drawings since the game launched.
That number is now growing at a rate of around 3,000 per second (on its first day, that number was an average of three per second). According to Zynga, the most popular words in the game are starfish, pregnant, hangman, six pack, and boom box. The least popular word? Latrine.
