MCV/DEVELOP News, events, research and jobs from the games industry
Casual games firm King has published a new infographic detailing its ten-year journey from company focused on tournament and gambling-like experiences to casual games giant.
Yesterday the firm rebranded to drop the ‘.com’ in its name and its green logo, and also revealed some startling stats, claiming it has 50 million daily players and 108 monthly unique users from its flagship Facebook and mobile game Candy Crush Saga.
The studio has also added more than 300 staff to its operation in the last years, rapidly rising from 120 employees to around 450 through a mixture of acquisitions and new studio openings.
The infographic, attached below, shows a roadmap of its beginnings from 2003, a year in which the company nearly went bust by December.
It 2004 however, the firm partnered with Yahoo! Europe and raised a round of Angel investment, with a further 34 million Euros in funduning coming a year later from Apax and Indie Ventures.
In 2007 the company began building its own original IP and user base, and four years later began to take off on Facebook. After its first game launch Bubble Saga, the firm at one point ranked as the 45th largest developer on the social network.
But after the studio’s launch of Candy Crush Saga, fortunes for the firm took a huge upturn, becoming the second largest Facebook developer as it began acquiring numerous studios across the world.
By 2013, Candy Crush Saga became the most-played game on Facebook, with its launch on mobile also meeting with huge success. The firm’s rapid growth has been such that it had a fully packed conference room for its GDC talk yesterday, with other developers looking to discover how it has risen to the top of the ladder.
Right click on the inforgraphic below and click view image, or click copy image URL, to see it in full size.
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