Guess what? This isn’t the biggest deal they’ve made.
Today King Digital Entertainment and Activision Blizzard finalized their deal to acquire King Digital Network for a whopping $5.9 billion. As you might remember back in November of last year Activision began the process of acquiring King after receiving approval from both boards. While King’s last major hit, Candy Crush Saga, is no longer making up the majority of their revenue, it looks like they’re still making a ludicrous amount of money overall, with their revenue topping at at $2.1 billion in 2015 alone. To help give some weight to that number: the video game industry at large made an estimated $91.5 billion in 2015, putting King Digital alone at just over 2.5% of the total industry’s total revenue overall.
The CEO of King, Riccardo Zacconi, touted their 474 million monthly active users, and hinted at leveraging Activision’s well known game titles along with their mobile expertise. Activision looks to be eyeing their massive user base to muscle into the mobile market, with King recently listing their monthly unique users at 330 million in 2015 down from 356 million in 2014.
For perspective Walt Disney paid $4.05bn for Lucasfilm in 2012 and $4bn for Marvel in 2009. But in terms of game acquisitions this is definitely one of the largest even when compared against Microsoft’s purchase of Minecraft developer Mojang for $2.5bn back in 2014.
That might seem like a lot of money for Activision, especially after buying up Major League Gaming (MLG) for a comparitively paltry $46 million a month ago – but this isn’t even their largest purchase to date! If we go all the way back to the beginning of Activision Blizzard in 2008 the company, then known simply as Activision, agreed on a $18.9bn deal with Vivendi Games to become the publisher we know today. After this monster deal with King today, I doubt they’re slowing down any time soon.
Matt Kondracki is the Senior News Editor for AYBOnline.com. His opinions are his own.
