Israeli gaming giant Plarium has entered the Finnish market. The company has acquired the Helsinki-based Futureplay studio. The amount and terms of the transaction are not specified.
Merge Gardens
“Combining Plarium’s infrastructure and marketing capabilities with Futureplay’s talents will allow us to further expand and diversify our portfolio of games,” Aviram Steinhart, CEO of Plarium, said following the deal.
The publisher also admits his interest in the casual direction, in which Futureplay has a solid expertise. In particular, the representative of Plarium points out that more and more elements of casual projects are found in midcore games. And from this point of view, the deal with the Finns makes a lot of sense.
Futureplay was founded in 2015 by Jamie Laes, who was previously responsible for the Rovio gaming direction. Jami is an evangelist of the view-to-play monetization model based on watching video ads. The first games of the studio were idlers, in which the player was offered to watch videos for accelerating progress.
Today, the main title of Futureplay is Merge Gardens, a successful clone of the Turkish blockbuster Merge Dragons. The Finnish title, according to AppMagic, earns up to $1 million per month. And it is him who Plarium calls as one of the reasons for the purchase.
By the way, the audiences of both companies were also named as part of the deal. Plarium claims an audience of 390 million people for its games, and Futureplay announces a figure of 140 million. In both cases, most likely, we are talking about cumulative downloads.