Headquartered in Stockholm and London,[1] and incorporated in St. Julian's, Malta,[2] King rose to prominence after releasing the cross-platform title Candy Crush Saga in 2012.
King is led by Riccardo Zacconi, who has served in the role of chief executive officer since co-founding the company in 2003.
[5][6] 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.
[5] The company was initially based out of Stockholm, Sweden, and started with the development of browser-based video games.
[9] Initially, Midasplayer.com was not profitable, and nearly went bankrupt until a cash infusion from Morris on Christmas Eve of 2003 helped to finance the company.
[3] During this year, the company raised $43 million by selling a large stake to Apax Partners and Index Ventures.
Bubble Witch Saga introduced the nature of a "saga" game: instead of playing the same gameboard for as long as the player could continue to match matches, the game offered individual levels that would challenge the player to complete certain goals in a limited number of turns.
[16] The formula proved extremely successful, and January 2012, Bubble Witch Saga had over 10 million players and was one of the most-played Facebook games.
[11] Facebook's director of games partnerships Sean Ryan described King.com's growth on the platform as "They were not a flash in the pan – they've been around seven years.
[8] In March 2013, on the ten-year anniversary of its founding, the company announced it was dropping the ".com" part of its branding and would continue on as just "King".
Its filing was made using allowances in the Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act to keep details of the IPO secret until it was to be offered.
The IPO was backed by Bank of America, Merrill Lynch, Credit Suisse Group AG and JPMorgan Chase & Co.
[29] Activision Blizzard as a result operates the world's largest game network,[30] reaching around 500 million users[30] in 196 countries.
[31] About the King acquisition, the CEO of Activision Blizzard explained that "we see great opportunities to create new ways for audiences to experience their favorite franchises, from Candy Crush to World of Warcraft to Call of Duty and more, across mobile devices, consoles and personal computers.
[32] As part of a large workforce reduction announced in February 2019 across the whole of Activision Blizzard, King's Z2Live studio in Seattle was shuttered.
[35] King's games portal site King.com had been rebranded to Royalgames.com, through which they offered paid-entry tournaments for a chance at cash prizes up until 2019, after which this feature was disabled for new accounts.
[39] King's games, prior to June 2013, made revenue for the company through a combination of in-game advertising and microtransactions.
The company stated that due to their "focus around delivering an uninterrupted entertainment experience for our network of loyal players across web, tablet and mobile has unfortunately led to the difficult decision of removing advertising as a core element of King's overall strategy".
[41] While King relies heavily on in-game purchases, it is estimated that only single-digit percentages of all players of their games have spent money on their titles.
[42][43] Bubble Witch Saga was King's first mobile game, released in July 2012 after its launch on Facebook in September 2011.
Following its success on Facebook, King launched Candy Crush Saga on mobile (iOS and Android) in November 2012.
[59] In January 2014, King attracted controversy after attempting to trademark the words "Candy" and "Saga" in game titles.
According to Cox, he was in talks with King about licensing Scamperghost, but when the deal fell through the company released the game Pac-Avoid.
Cox said Epicshadows, the developer of Pac-Avoid, told him that King had approached them to "clone the game very quickly".