Kabam sold the Vancouver studio and part of the offices in Austin and San Francisco, along with the name of the Korean Netmarble Games. The transaction amount may be $800 million.
Kabam division in Vancouver is the developer of the mobile fighting game Marvel: Contest of Champions. The game is responsible for 95% of the company’s revenue.
In two years of existence, Marvel: Contest of Champions earned $450 million. The cumulative number of downloads of the game since its release in December 2014 amounted to 90 million. For the past year, the game has been in the box office Top 20 apps on the App Store in the USA.
Under the terms of the deal, Netmarble receives, in addition to the studio itself, its Marvel: Contest of Champions and Transformers: Forged to Fight projects, the name Kabam, as well as the game support team in Austin and parts of the business development, marketing and UA departments at the headquarters in San Francisco (in total, in addition to developers, 250 people).
The amount of the transaction was not disclosed, Kabam previously received an offer to sell the division for $700-$800 million. A source of The Wall Street Journal, close to the deal, assures that the sale price is just in this range.
The remaining Kabam studios – in Los Angeles, San Francisco and Beijing – will be put up for sale after the completion of the deal with Netmarble.
Kingdoms of Camelot
Kabam became famous for the Kingdoms of Camelot strategy (it was cloned by the authors of Game of War), which by the end of 2012 became the highest-grossing app on the App Store.
In total, the company earned $180 million that year. Most of them fell on mobile strategies: the mentioned Kingdoms of Camelot, Arcane Empires and The Hobbit: Kingdoms of Middle-earth.
In mid-2013, the company was valued at $700 million. She earned $362 million that year. In 2013, she began trying to diversify her business: she produced not only strategies, but also races, battlers, and bought third-party studios.
In the summer of 2014, Kabam was already valued at $1 billion. Based on this estimate, Alibaba invested $120 million in it. During that year, the company earned $400 million.
In 2015, CEO Kevin Chou announced a policy change. He stated that the company will reduce the number of projects produced and focus on their quality. As part of the strategy, the company’s old projects (including Kingdoms of Camelot) were sold off.
In the case of The Marvel: Contest of Champions, the strategy paid off, but other major projects did not find their audience. The large-scale by mobile standards MMO Star Wars: Uprising, the CSR clone Fast & Furious: Legacy and the role-playing game Spirit Lords were closed.
Spirit Lords
Kabam is not the first major purchase for Netmarble.
Koreans are also the largest shareholder of SGN, the authors of Panda Pop, Cookie Jam and Juice Jam. Earlier this year, Netmarble tried to acquire Playtika for more than $4 billion, but the Israeli company was “taken away” by the Chinese.
The central project of Netmarble is the role-playing action Marvel: Future Fight. Its total downloads by the summer of this year amounted to 40 million. Star Wars: Force Arena, a new reading of Clash Royale, is on the way.
Sources: The Wall Street Journal, VentureBeat