Modern Times Group, Sweden’s digital media group which holds a strong portfolio of esports and gaming companies has reportedly acquired Bangalore’s gaming firm PlaySimple for a whopping $360 million, or INR 2600 crores. Multiple outlets including TechCrunch have reported, the deal value as much as $510 million.
PlaySimple has a portfolio of nine games, with over 75 million installs and 3 million monthly active users. It has more additional games underway for a 2021 launch.
PlaySimple’s Word Domination in Free To Play Market
The games include Word Trip, Word Jam, and Word Wars among others grew up in popularity last year amid the surging internet and gaming population worldwide. Thanks to the deadly pandemic which rattled the global sports and entertainment market with events cancellations.
“PlaySimple is a rapidly growing and highly profitable games studio that quickly has established itself as one of the leading global developers of free-to-play word games, an exciting new genre for MTG.”
said MTG Group President & Chief Executive Maria Redin.
In the first half of 2021 alone, PlaySimple already had $60 million in revenue compared to the $83 million in the whole of last year. This, fueled by the rising awareness of gaming in India, which had tens of millions of new gamers in the last two years.
The Bangalore-based company had raised $4 million in a Series A round from Elevation Capital and Chiratae Ventures valuing the company at $16 million in the year 2016.
MTG’s esports and gaming arm has prior investments in India
Modern Times Group owns esports companies ESL (82%), DreamHack (100%), and casual gaming firms such as InnoGames and Ninja Kiwi. It also owns US-based gaming company Kongregate, which it purchased in the year 2017 from the games retailer GameStop.
MTG’s subsidiary company ESL has made strategic investments in the Indian esports ecosystem. The German-headquartered esports broadcast platform has picked up a minority stake in India’s Nazara Technology, which owns a majority in ESL’s Indian partner Nodwin Gaming. Quite a swirled branch!
