Israeli social casino gaming giant Playtika has acquired Finnish mobile game publisher Seriously, GamesBeat has learned. The companies confirmed the deal to us, but they did not say what the purchase price was.
We have heard that the price was $275 million. But the company has only confirmed that it has been on a $100 million run-rate for revenues since the beginning of the year and now the run rate is higher.
Based in Helsinki, Seriously is the publisher of the Best Fiends, a cartoon-style mobile game that launched in 2014 and has been downloaded close to 100 million times. The game has nearly 2 million daily active users, or users that come back daily.
Seriously took a page from the strategy of its neighbor Rovio, the maker of the Angry Birds mobile games and films, by launching an animated cartoon based on Best Fiends. Among the all-star voice cast for the animated short films: Mark Hamill of Star Wars fame, who is also one of the best voice actors around (his Joker is iconic).
“They have really strong skill sets in technology, performance marketing, analytics, and live operations that are super impressive and these are areas where we’re looking to scale up,” said Andrew Stalbow, the CEO of Seriously, in an exclusive interview with GamesBeat. “We bring some really strong products, creativity, experience with mass media marketing, and knowledge of the non-traditional channels of the mobile game industry. We felt it could be a good combination.”
