PopCap Games, perhaps the foremost leader of casual games, has announced that it has come to an agreement to acquire ZipZapPlay. For those that don’t know, ZipZapPlay is a social gamesstudio with a large Facebook presence. PopCap will be benefiting from that presence with the acquisition.

ZipZapPlay will continue acting as an independant studio on San Francisco with co-founders Curt Bererton (CEO) and Mathilde Pignol (CCO) reporting to PopCap’s Vice President of Social GamesDevelopment, Jon David.

The studio will continue its game design and development by its founders. PopCap Co-founder and Vice President of Corporate Strategy and Development, John Vechey had this to say about the acquisition, which he oversaw:

“The team at ZipZapPlay is one of the best in the social games space, and combined with our existing group in Seattle gives us the opportunity to dramatically expand our development resources. While the acquisition creates immediate cross-promotional and operations benefits, this is a strategic move with huge long-term potential; we believe ZipZapPlay can help us further evolve and expand the definition of social games.”

Jason Kapalka, PopCap’s co-founder and Chief Creative Officer believes that ZipZapPlay is a great cultural fit, saying the studio is “a truly creative company that lives and breathes in this space.” He also claims that “their next game is very innovative and exciting; we believe it has the potential to be a step forward in the evolution of social gaming.”

ZipZapPlay’s Bererton is elated to join PopCap Games and help their prescence in the social games arena:

“PopCap’s focus on innovative gameplay and user experience meshes with our own design philosophy. We can’t wait to put our heads together with PopCap and start creating the next generation of games for Facebook and other social platforms.”

With the expansion of PopCap’s social game developmental capabilities, the company is hoping to have four or five games published on Facebook by the end of 2011. PopCap’s initial social games, Bejeweled Blitz and Zuma Blitz, currently attract about five million active users daily, making the company the third largest Facebook game developer, after Zynga and Electronic Arts respectively.

[Source: Press Release, see spoiler below]