The developer of the popular Facebook and smartphone game Candy Crush Saga is set to make billions when it goes public on the stock exchange. The British based company King is on its way to become the most valuable British web company to join the stock market after receiving a public offering of $7.6 billion. Candy Crush became a phenomenal success when it got initially released for Facebook games back in April 2012, taking over the crown of most played Facebook game which was originally held by Farmville. It then found even greater success when it got released for IOS in November of the same year, and then for Android the month after, thus leading the game to get played by an average of 144 million players daily.
According to The Guardian, chief executive Ricardo Zacconi and and Chairman Melvyn Morris are set to be worth over $745 million and the company itself is valued four times higher than Take Two Interactive, who made a killing last year thanks to Rockstar’s Grand Theft Auto 5. Candy Crush Saga is known for its highly addictive gameplay. While it is a free download, it follows the controversial gaming model Freemium, which places players who have lost all their lives behind a time barrier that can be bypassed by receiving a life from a friend or purchasing them through micro-transactions.
By seeing that King is worth more than one of the biggest video game publishers in the world, this is clear sign about how lucrative casual gaming really has become. King has overshadowed Flappy Birds financially, which was predicted to be even more successful than Candy Crush and was making the developer Doug Nguyen $50,000 a day through advertising.