Another gaming company is preparing to enter the stock exchange. China‘s Qingci Games has filed for an IPO. The studio has six mobile games on its account, of which the most famous is Marvelous Snail — a casual game about a snail in the post-apocalypse. In China, this game holds the second place in popularity in its genre.
Marvelous Snail
There are almost no details about the upcoming placement.
So far, it is only clear that it will take place in Hong Kong.
Currently, Yang Xu, its founder and executive director, remains the largest shareholder of Qingci Games. It is followed by G‑bits Network Technology with 21.37% of the shares. Tencent, Alibaba and Bilibili also own 4.99% of the company’s shares.
Qingci Games opened in 2012. She specializes mainly in Idle and Roguelike games. Recently, the earnings of the Chinese studio have been growing rapidly. In the first quarter of 2021 alone, the company’s revenue amounted to ¥480 million ($74.2 million), which is more than a third of revenue for the whole of 2020 (¥1.2 billion or $185 million).
How much the studio brought Marvelous Snail is not specified. But usually the title is responsible for 95% of Qingci Games’ revenue. By 2023, the Chinese plan to release 10 more games.
It should be noted that the growth of popularity of Qingci Games occurred against the background of the boom of mobile games in China due to the pandemic. According to the research company Niko Partners, by the end of 2020 there were 681.7 million mobile gamers in China, which is 7% more than a year earlier.