Candy Crush Developer King Digital Bought for $5.9 Billion

Activision Blizzard, one of the biggest names in video games just made a huge announcement. They are acquiring King Digital Entertainment, the company that brought us Candy Crush. Activision and Candy Crush’s King Digital sealed the deal for $18 in cash per share. This means that the global price of King Digital was set to $5.9 billion. This is quite an impressive sum for the acquisition of a gaming company. But then again, only Candy Crush alone has more than million daily users.  And Candy Crush is only one of the 180 games developed by King Digital Entertainment.

Activision Blizzard already was behind the Call of Duty World of Warcraft video games. The Candy Crush addition definitely will turn Activision into the global leader in interactive entertainment across mobile, console and PC platforms. According to Activision Blizzard, “The combined company will have a world-class interactive entertainment portfolio of top-performing franchises.” Activision Blizzard, as we stated, already had video games of different kinds. With the acquisition of King Digital Entertainment and its Candy Crush- like games it will also cover another spectrum of gamers. The ones that don’t necessarily have the time and disposition to play more challenging and complex games than Candy Crush.

King Digital Entertainment made its debut in 2003. Since then they developed more than 180 games. The most well- known King games is the Candy Crush Saga. It is followed by Candy Crush Soda Saga, Pet Rescue and other games. Now the Candy Crush game and its siblings can be played on mobile devices also. Initially they were designed to be played on Facebook. This social network probably contributed a lot to the success of Candy Crush. Now it is played by millions of people on a daily basis. In 2013 Candy Crush was the most downloaded iOS app.

Activision Blizzard payed a huge sum of money for King Digital Entertainment and Candy Crush. Even so, it is a great investment considering the fact that mobile gaming sales are expected to hit $29 billion this year. This sum will further grow in the next years. By 2018, it is expected that revenue from mobile games will reach $45 billion. Since the majority of the most sought games are now owned by Activision Blizzard, they can expect a great income.