After many significant acquisitions in 2022, the game industry's acquisition boom is gradually spreading to the casual game sector as well. Recently, Danish mobile game developer Sybo officially announced that Tencent's wholly-owned subsidiary Miniclip has agreed to complete the acquisition of Sybo, and since both parties are private game companies, the specific terms or purchase price of the deal have not been publicly disclosed. Mathias Gredal Nørvig, CEO of Sybo, did tell the media that this is the biggest M&A deal in the European mobile gaming industry this year.
Sybo's CEO Mathias and Miniclip'sCEO Saad Choudri
Founded in 2001, Miniclip has successfully accumulated a large user base across 195 countries and regions on six continents, and its growing number of products now includes more than 60 games. That number comprises primarily casual games, including 8 Ball Pool, Golf Battle, Football Strike, Carrom Pool and other popular products. Tencent acquired a majority stake in the company in 2015, and Miniclip currently employs 910 people in 13 offices around the world and has 250 million monthly active users for its products. In the first quarter of 2022, Miniclip reached 4 billion cumulative downloads of its games.
Casual games that Sybo launched
The reason why Sybo has achieved such success is that it created Subway Surfers, an evergreen casual mobile game. Since its foundation in 2012, Subway Surfer has been setting records for casual mobile games. A week after its release on the App Store, the game reached the top of the free download rank in 20 countries and regions, and soon after that, it topped the free rank in 50 countries and regions, including the United States. In September 2015, three years after its release, Subway Surfer reached one billion downloads worldwide, and it still remained among the most downloaded mobile games in the world until 2019. Today, Subway Surfer has been downloaded more than 3 billion times and is also the first Google Play game to be downloaded more than 1 billion times, as well as the most downloaded endless running game in the App Store’s history.
Thanks to persistent content updates, Subway Surfer returned to the world's top downloaded mobile games in May. In response, Nørvig revealed some interesting information: 18 months ago, Subway Surfers had around 10-15 million daily active user counts but has managed to raise that to about 30 million daily active users today. On top of that, the game's monthly active users are a staggering 150 million.
Miniclip plans to launch 14 games this year. Choudri stated that Miniclip is not creating some kind of financial arbitrage through acquisition. Miniclip wants to continue to make great games, and that's why they are launching more products this year than ever before. Sybo also has a general plan for some new games they will release soon. Hopefully, we'll hear good news from them in the next few months.