Activision Blizzard Buys Candy Crush Dev King for 5.9 Billion

You think your grandmother has spent too much money on Candy Crush? Activision Blizzard just blew that number out of the water.

King, the Ireland-based company responsible for Candy Crush, Bubble Witch, and Farm Heroes, was just bought out for a whooping 5.9 billion dollars. That’s billion with a B, ladies and gentleman. That’s the more than Disney spent on Star Wars (4 billion) but less than Activision Blizzard spent to buy itself, which was 8.2 billion dollars way back in 2013. But, even put in those scales--this is an astronomically large sum to be throwing around.

From the press release…
 

Activision Blizzard believes that the addition of King’s highly-complementary business will position Activision Blizzard as a global leader in interactive entertainment across mobile, console and PC platforms, and positions the company for future growth... The combined revenues and profits solidify our position as the largest, most profitable standalone company in interactive entertainment. With a combined global network of more than half a billion monthly active users, our potential to reach audiences around the world on the device of their choosing enables us to deliver great games to even bigger audiences than ever before.

Now, nearly 6 billion is a lot to spend on a free-to-play developer, but the revenue produced by Candy Crush makes it a worthwhile sale--alone, it made 1.33 billion dollars in 2014, and it’s popularity shows no sign of waning. In a few years, it may pay itself off.

But more to the point, this means when the transition is final, which will happen in 2016, Activision Blizzard (King Activision Blizzard now?) will be the biggest game company… ever. One company owning World of Warcraft, Call of Duty, and Candy Crush, as well as working closely with Bungie and Destiny? At the very least it puts it on even footing with EA, which makes an insane amount of money from their yearly sports games, but--seriously, this is huge.  At least, assuming King manages to keep pulling in numbers--these one-hit wonders like Candy Crush rarely last long, even with the momentum it's built, so it's not impossible it'll blow up in their faces.

We may need to keep a closer eye on Activision from here on out...