King.com
 King.com     | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Founder | • Toby Rowland • Riccardo Zacconi |
King.com Limited, trading as King and also known as King Digital Entertainment, is a Maltese video game developer and publisher based in St Julian's, Malta that specialises in social games. King.com gained fame after releasing the cross-platform title "Candy Crush Saga" in 2012, considered one of the most financially successful games utilising the freemium model.
King.com was acquired by Activision Blizzard in February 2016 for US$5.9 billion, and operates as its own entity within that company.
King.com is led by Riccardo Zacconi, who was in the role of chief executive officer since co-founding the company in 2003. Gerhard Florin took over Melvyn Morris's role as chairman in November 2014. As of 2017, King.com employs 2,000 people.[1]
Founding
Prior to founding King.com, Riccardo Zacconi and Toby Rowland, the latter of whom is the only son of British businessman Tiny Rowland, had worked together on uDate.com, a dating website created by Melvyn Morris which, by 2003, was the second-largest such site in the world. Morris opted to sell the site to the leading dating website Match.com (a subsidiary of IAC) for $150 million in 2003. Zacconi and Rowland joined with Thomas Hartwig, Sebastian Knutsson, Lars Markgren and Patrik Stymne, all of whom had worked previously with Zacconi at the failed dot-com web portal Spray, to create a new company with angel investment provided by Morris, who became the company's chairman. The company was initially based out of Stockholm, Sweden, and started with the development of browser-based video games. The site, Midasplayer.com, was then launched in August 2003.
Initially, Midasplayer.com was not profitable, and nearly went bankrupt until a cash infusion from Morris on Christmas Eve of 2003 helped to finance the company. By 2005, the company had been able to turn a profit. During this year, the company raised $43 million by selling a large stake to Apax Partners and Index Ventures. This investment was the last one that the company received before its initial public offering in 2014.
Midasplayer.com was rebranded King.com in November 2005. King.com continued to develop games for its web portal, which it would also share to other web portals like Yahoo! Overall, King.com had developed about 200 games for their portal. By 2009, the company was making about $60 million annually.
Toby Rowland departed the company in 2008 to found Mangahigh, a web portal aimed for educational math games, and sold his stake back to the company for $3 million in 2011. Angel investor and former board member Klaus Hommels sold his similar stake at the same time.[2]
References
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