Activision has just announced the acquisition of digitial crack developer King Digital Entertainment, the producers of Candy Crush, for a whopping $5.9 BILLION DOLLARS. To put that into perspective, that’s 1.5 times higher than Disney bought out Lucasfilms & Star Wars.
Describing the deal, King CEO Riccardo Zacconi said that his company had built one of the largest networks of players on Facebook and on mobile devices, noting that King’s games had “474 million monthly active users” in the third quarter of 2015.
Activision already owns one of the biggest gaming franchises in Call of Duty, in addition to huge properties such as World of WarCraft and StarCraft through its merger with Blizzard in 2008. The company’s gaming portfolio grows even bigger with the addition of the biggest name in social gaming, but there’s no guarantee King will be able to keep up its success forever. Hell, even the Blizzard side is having trouble keeping World of Warcraft subscription numbers up with the announcement today that the player base on the hit MMO has dropped to 5.5 million active users as of September 2015.
Weill this be a huge money spinner for Activision/Blizzard or did they just buy a dud? Only time will tell.