Electronic Arts said Wednesday that the company has bought Chillingo, the publisher - but not the developer - of the hit mobile game Angry Birds. Rovio, which owns the rights to the game, was not sold.

Chillingo does own the right to publish the game on the Apple iPad and the iPhone. But Rovio can do as it wishes with the intellectual property.

Electronic Arts paid about $20 million for Chillingo, according to Reuters, which earlier reported the transaction. In response to the question, "Do you plan on making any new deals with EA/Chillingo?" Rovio tweeted "nothing planned, but never say never".

"The acquisition combines Chillingo's expertise in cultivating the ideas of independent developers with EA's global reach in mobile publishing," EA said in a statement. "Chillingo is widely recognized for publishing highly original and successful games from the developer community. EA is committed to preserving Chillingo's independence enabling them to manage and cultivate their great network of relationships to deliver the optimal gaming experience for consumers."

Chillingo also publishes Cut the Rope, Helsing's Fire, Predators, Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs, Minigore, iDracula, and Modern Conflict.

Rovio developed the extremely popular Angry Birds game, a physics-based puzzler originally released for the iOS platform. On October 15, Rovio brought the game to the Android platform as a free ad-supported game, following a a launch on Getjar which crashed the site's servers. By October 18, the game had netted over 2 million downloads.

Social gaming, meanwhile, continues to attract the attention of gaming companies; Disney bought social gaming company Playdom for $563.2 million in July. In August, meanwhile, Google bought social gaming company SocialDeck.