King, in fairness, has multiple games in the App Store at the top of the Top Grossing charts in addition to Candy Crush Saga. No idea what Activision gets out of this. (games like Call of Duty have been sneaking ad-hoc microtransactions similar to F2P games)
I realize analogies aren't meant to be perfect but when you stress the 'exact same'-ness I'll confess I find Activision is nothing like Zynga here. Zynga was already focused on social/mobile games like OMGPOP and bought them defensively (Words WF was hemorrhaging daily users to Draw Something at time of the purchase). Meanwhile Activision and King are focused in completely different niches and Activision isn't in danger of disappearing or cannibalized to bits by copycats overnight.
Second, King appears to be remarkably safer investment than one hit wonder OMGPOP. They've kept multiple titles in the top 20 for several years running and their annual gaming revenue is on scale with Nintendo[1].
Given that Supercell is not on the market is there an aquisition target remotely as good as King which is demonstrably great at the one thing Activision is terrible at? (granted Blizzard is doing well in mobile with Hearthstone).
[1] http://www.newzoo.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/Small_Newzo...
The F2P environment has been shifting to be more user friendly, and consequently less revenue-generating. I'm still uncertain that King's brand of F2P is sustainable in the long term.
Exploitative f2p games fall by the wayside and the most successful formula seems to be: (1) make a game that's great even for people who spend nothing, (2) take advantage of network effects to get a large sticky playerbase and (3) profit off a fraction of the players.
Boom Beach is my favorite mobile game by a large margin, I've spent a whopping $5 (on account of relying on the wiki for costs) and there are players in global top 50 who have spent nothing. I feel zero compulsion to spend anything except perhaps to reward the company for hundreds of hours of ad-free gaming.
The fact that you call the OMGPOP game 'Tetris' explains how they got away with it I think =)
edit: is there any other example like tetris in the games industry?
Worse news: the thing that they sell is something that people regret buying.
Blizzard has no idea how to make money from mobile. King makes an absolutely ungodly amount of money (especially measuring per user). Blizzard knows it needs to be able to make money from mobile eventually. Hence, a huge price.
Blizzard isn't just buying King for Candy Crush. They're buying King because they know how to make Candy Crush.
A coworker was under the impression that King had trouble duplicating the success of Candy Crush. No idea if that's true, but if it is, it could be that it was a lucky hit, and King actually had no idea how to make these games successful.
Perhaps Supercell would have been a better target; they seem to have a number of reasonably successful games. More minor successes might be better than a single smash hit if you're more interested in the underlying knowledge.
They know what they are doing.
Uhh, Hearthstone?
Two things:
One, King has more sustainable revenues than OMGPOP. Two, they get to tell their shareholders they are competing in an established area of high growth (i.e. mobile apps).
Activision/Blizzard doesn't have a huge presence in the casual space. This expands their market and doing so with success. It should at the very least turn out better for them.