The acquisition of Gram Games mobile games studio cost Zynga $250 million, becoming the most expensive purchase of the company in recent years.
Turkish Studio Gram Games has attracted the attention of Zynga with its promising franchise of Merge mobile puzzles. Now it includes Merge Farm!, Merge Town!, Merge Gems! and the most successful game of the series is Merge Dragons! (sixth place in the ranking of family games on the App Store). The company considers the latter as a new flagship — to replace FarmVille-type simulators that are losing popularity.
The monthly revenue of Merge Dragons!, according to Datamagic, exceeds $2.5 million, and this is less than that of the highest-grossing Zynga farm — FarmVille 2: Country Escape ($3 million). However, Zynga CEO Frank Gibeau I am sure — the potential of Merge Dragons! not implemented yet:
Executive Director of Zynga
Zynga is not going to make big adjustments to the style of work of the studio yet: all 77 employees Gram Games will remain in the same place after the transaction, the overall product development strategy will not change.
In addition to sharing experience, Zynga will also help Gram Games in the fight against illegal cloning of titles — before the studio repeatedly faced the fact that clones of its games appear in online stores.
Gram Games was founded in 2012, the development team is based in Istanbul and London. The first released game of the studio was Puzzle 1010!, in 2015 the number of its installations exceeded 50 million. It was the company’s biggest hit until 2017, when it began releasing Merge series games.
Also on the topic:
- Deconstruction of Merge Town!: the Heyday of the hyper-casual genreGoldman Sachs invested $200 million in a mobile games studio
- A source:
Reuters, Gamesindustry