Online game titles like "Mobsters 2" or "Big City Life" might not seem a particularly appropriate fit for the Mouseketeer demographic, but that, apparently, is not the point of Walt Disney Co.'s (NYSE:DIS) $763 million agreement Tuesday to purchase social gaming company Playdom Inc.

Disney CEO Bob Iger has expressed a keen interest in enhancing the old-media company's digital prowess, and has acknowledged that buying beats building. If it wants to be a player in the fastest-growing social gaming areas, Disney needs an entry into the premier networks, namely Facebook and MySpace. It's $700 million purchase of Club Penguin in 2007 didn't accomplish this, though it provided a social networking site with virtual goods revenue that directly targeted Disney's main audience of children.

While many of Playdom's games are hardly kid-friendly, the acquisition provides an adjunct to the company's vaunted collection of characters and movies. Social networking is a new frontier for marketing and gives Disney a new way to interact with consumers, and the Playdom purchase brings with it a brain trust that will help the company expand in this direction.

As Disney executive vice president Kevin Mayer said last fall, a deal should apply technology to reach people in innovative ways. It also should fend off competitors and be significant enough to "move the needle" at the $40 billion company. As far as social gaming properties go, Playdom was pretty much the only choice left for Disney of the "big three" companies in this space. Electronic Arts Inc. (NASDAQ:ERTS) bought out social networking game property Playfish in November for $400 million. The last remaining large player, heavily funded Zynga Game Network Inc., is so richly valued that, as Playdom investor Jeremy Liew of Lightspeed Venture Partners told The Wall Street Journal, "it becomes a difficult company to acquire for a lot who would be interested."

Regardless of how the Playdom acquisition pans out for Disney, it once again supplies a fast, rich payout for venture capitalists, who have been pouring money into social gaming companies including hi5 Networks, Alamofire Inc. and Platform G. Playdom itself scooped up $76 million in financing in just the past nine months, with its latest, $33 million round landing in June.

As Liew put it: "We made money, and we made money fast."