King (company)
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| Subsidiary | |
| Industry | Video game industry |
| Founded | August 2003 |
| Founders |
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| Headquarters | , Sweden |
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Area served
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Worldwide |
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Key people
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Riccardo Zacconi (CEO) |
| Products | Candy Crush Saga |
| Revenue |
 US$2.26 billion (2014) |
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US$661.00 million (2014) |
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US$575.00 million (2014) |
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Number of employees
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~1400 |
| Parent | Activision Blizzard |
| Subsidiaries | King.com Ltd |
| Website | king |
King Digital Entertainment plc, doing business as King, is a social games company. King develops games for the web, for mobile (iOS, Android, Windows Phone), Facebook, and Windows 10. King gained fame after releasing the cross-platform title Candy Crush Saga in 2012, considered the first successful game utilitizing the freemium model. King was acquired by Activision Blizzard in February 2016 for $5.9 billion, and operates as its own entity within that company.
King is led by Riccardo Zacconi, who has served in that role since co-founding the company in 2003. Gerhard Florin is the current Chairman of Board. He took over from Melvyn Morris when he stepped down in November 2014. The company has 1400 employees. In 2013, it spent $110.5 million on research and development, roughly 6 percent of sales.
Prior to founding King, Zacconi and Toby Rowland worked together on uDate.com, a dating website created by Melvyn Morris which by 2003 was the second-largest one in the world. Morris opted to sell site to the leading dating website Match.com (a subsidiary of IAC) for $150 million in 2003.
Zacconi and Rowland joined with Sebastian Knutsson, Thomas Hartwig, Lars Markgren and Patrik Stymne, all 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. King.com was founded in Sweden in 2003, and initially started with the development of browser-based video games. Morris served as Chairman, while Zacconi and Rowland were co-CEOs.
Initially, King.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 had to make until its initial public offering. King.com continued to develop games for its web portal, which it would also share to other web portals like Yahoo! By 2009, the company was making about $60 million annually. Rowland departed the company in 2008 to found Magnahigh, 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.
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Wikipedia