We just got word this morning that King Games, makers of the absurdly popular match-3 game Candy Crush Saga, has publicly filed for an IPO in the United States. King filed confidentially last year, but now they’re totally public about, um, wanting to go public. There’s no question why King decided to try and cash in now; Candy Crush is one of the most popular mobile apps in the world, and King boasts almost 130 million users that will gladly shell out for extra lives, bombs, and lollipop hammers. They made over half a billion dollars in profit last year by selling pixels. Clearly, the time is ripe to get some shareholders in on the action.
But don’t cash in your life insurance to buy up shares right away. King still needs to get valued, and we don’t know how much the Securities and Exchange Commission will say they’re worth (though King execs will obviously try to convince them that the company is worth billions). And leaving that aside, let’s not forget that plenty of other casual gaming giants have risen and fallen in recent years. Just look at Zynga, who poisoned the minds of our nation’s parents back in 2009 with Farmville. They started trading at $10 two years later; in 2012, they could barely get $2. They’re on the rise again now, but that just shows you how fickle the market can be, especially when your specialty is convincing people to give you money so that they can play more repetitive puzzle games.
The deciding factor will be whether or not King can come up with something new for us to play on our commute, once we collectively look up from our smartphones and realize that we would rather eat real candies than destroy fake ones. They also make Farm Heroes Saga and Pet Rescue Saga, but these three games are honestly not so much “sagas” as they are “nearly endless color-matching games for instant gratification.” When those kinds of games make up 95% of your revenue, you’re on shaky ground. So we’ll need to wait and see if King’s creative department will come up with anything new before passing judgement on their IPO.
Of course, none of this sways the relentless optimism of the King execs, who reportedly plan to list on the New York Stock Exchance under the symbol “KING.” We’ll see, gentlemen. We’ll see.
For more information, including up-to-the-minute stock info, see the Wall Street Journal; for in-depth analysis on how Zynga’s “fancy schmancy real estate” might make it a better pick, you’ll want to visit Yahoo Finance.
Featured image via BusinessInsider
