Elisabeth Murdoch's Shine TV production company has acquired the London-based social gaming startup, Bossa Studios, for an undisclosed fee.
The acquisition is Shine Group's first foray into the nascent social gaming market, and comes just months after News Corporation bought the TV firm for $673m.
Based in Shoreditch, east London, Bossa Studios creates games for social networking sites including Facebook and MySpace. Eleven-month old Bossa Studios is set to unveil its first Facebook game, dubbed Monstermind, next week.
Murdoch said on Friday: "As a global content company, we are committed to producing exceptional experiences across multiple platforms and developing direct-to-consumer models.
"We have long identified social gaming as a critical component to this strategy, and in Bossa Studios we discovered an entrepreneurial, creative team that shared our passion for creative excellence. They have bold ideas for this space which we naturally welcome and will be a significant addition to the Shine Group."
The acquisition will enable Shine to add Facebook and social gaming elements to some of its most popular programmes, including MasterChef and Merlin.
Investor appetite in social gaming firms has grown in the past 12 months, driven largely by the rise of Zynga, the company behind hugely popular Facebook games FarmVille and CityVille.
According to public offering documents filed at the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on Thursday, Zynga valued itself at $11.5bn at the end of the first quarter of 2011. The company plans to raise $1bn in one of the most hotly anticipated IPOs of the new generation of internet firms later this year.
Henrique Olifiers, a co-founder of Bossa Studios, said: "We are delighted to be both launching Monstermind and joining the Shine Group.
"Shine has shown a great support for Bossa Studio's creative-led mission and together, in addition to launching entirely new concepts, we hope to offer hundreds of millions of TV viewers and social gamers the opportunity to experience some their most-loved programmes in an entirely fresh, immersive way."