Blizzard, the company behind World of Warcraft and Call of Duty is making a big move into the mobile gaming market.
Activision Blizzard is making a play to bring its brand name to the mobile gaming industry in a very big way. The PC and console gaming giant, responsible for such titles as World of Warcraft and Call of Duty, recently announced its intentions to buy King Digital Entertainment for a sweet $5.9 billion. King is a dominant force in the mobile gaming industry with such titles as Candy Crush Saga and Farm Heroes Saga to its credit.
Activision’s strategic move into the mobile gaming industry strengthens the company’s overall positioning as the world largest publisher of interactive titles. The company’s past success has been built upon games made almost exclusively for PCs or consoles, including Guitar Hero and the increasingly popular Destiny.
While Activision titles lead the PC and console gaming markets, the company is a relative latecomer to the mobile gaming industry. Activision’s limited presence in this slice of the market has been largely isolated to such titles as Skylanders and Hearthstone.
King, however, has made a name for itself exclusively in the mobile arena. The company’s mobile games boasted 474 million active monthly users in the third quarter of 2015 alone, with Candy Crush Saga being its biggest title by far. The game remains the fourth highest-grossing title in Apple’s App Store a remarkable three years after its original release.
You Might Also Enjoy: How Batman, Scooby Doo and Homer Simpson Help Warner Bros Top the Video Game Industry
The acquisition, Activision asserts, is anticipated to bring big revenues to the table while exciting larger investors. With the mobile gaming industry anticipated to deliver some $36 billion in revenue by the end of 2015, Activision’s play may prove to be a wise one. As Activision’s CEO Bobby Kotick sees it, the purchase shores up his company’s market position.
“The combined revenues and profits solidify our position as the largest, most profitable standalone company in interactive entertainment,” Kotick was quoted in a media release as saying. “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.”
The Activision-King deal is anticipated to close early next year. Whether the purchase will enable Activision to crush the mobile gaming market or not remains to be seen. What is clear is that Activision Blizzard is out to stay on top. With 2015 revenues for the industry as a whole anticipated to reach the $91.5 billion mark, according to the market research firm Newzoo, that $5.9 billion purchase price may very well prove to be a sound investment.
