įollowing this model, in October 2011, the company released Bubble Witch Saga to both platforms. Their first cross-platform web portal/Facebook game, Miner Speed, which allowed sharing of player information between platforms, was released in 2011, and was a simple match-3 tile game inspired by Bejeweled. used their web portal as a testing grounds for new game ideas and determine which ones to bring to Facebook, as well as determining how to implement various microtransactions for tournament-style play into the Facebook games. saw a significant drop in players on their portal games as a result, and started to develop their own Facebook-based games using the games already developed on the portal, with their first such game released in 2010. Transition to social gaming Īround 2009, social network games on Facebook began to gain popularity, led primarily through games developed by Zynga. Angel investor and former board member Klaus Hommels sold his similar stake at the same time.
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. By 2009, the company was making about $60 million annually. continued to develop games for its web portal, which it would also share to other web portals like Yahoo! Overall, King had developed about 200 games for their portal.
This investment was the last one that the company received before its initial public offering in 2014. During this year, the company raised $43 million by selling a large stake to Apax Partners and Index Ventures. By 2005, the company had been able to turn a profit. Initially, was not profitable, and nearly went bankrupt until a cash infusion from Morris on Christmas Eve of 2003 helped to finance the company. The site,, was then launched in August of that year.
The company was initially based out of Stockholm, Sweden, and started with the development of browser-based video games. 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. Morris opted to sell the site to the leading dating website (a subsidiary of IAC) for $150 million in 2003. Prior to founding King, Riccardo Zacconi and Toby Rowland, the latter of whom is the only son of British businessman Tiny Rowland, had worked together on, a dating website created by Melvyn Morris which, by 2003, was the second-largest such site in the world.
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