Korean game maker invests $130 million in SGN
U.S. mobile game publisher SGN, maker of games such as Cookie Jam, has gotten a $130 million investment from top South Korean game maker Netmarble Games.
The Seoul-based Netmarble becomes the largest shareholder in SGN. The companies will remain independent, but work together. "They have expertise we don't have and we have expertise they don't have," said SGN co-founder and CEO Chris DeWolfe. "We can help them in the West and they can help us in the East. We are separate companies, but there are synergies."
DeWolfe and fellow MySpace co-founder Aber Whitcomb founded L.A.-based SGN with former Fox executive Josh Yguado. SGN’s games including recent release Juice Jam have been downloaded more than 500 million times.
SGN's "match-three" puzzle game Cookie Jam, released in May 2014, was named Facebook's Game of the Year last year and launched in China in March 2015. SGN is the second largest developer of casual/puzzle games in the world, behind Candy Crush Saga publisher King. The company has projected its 2015 revenue at $280 million.
Teaming up with Netmarble will also help SGN gain success in Asia, which is the number one global game market with projected revenue of $45 billion by 2018. "The market is consolidating and the big companies are getting bigger and we want to end up as one of the five or six biggest game developers and publishers in the world," DeWolfe said. "We need to continue to grow and grow globally."
While most of Netmarble’s games (Everybody's Marble, Seven Knights) have been hits only in Asia, its recent action role-playing game Marvel Future Fight was the No. 6 Google Play/iOS app worldwide in May, according to AppAnnie.com. The game, timed to the theatrical release of Avengers: Age of Ultron, also hit No. 1 by daily downloads among iPhone games in more than 40 countries, the site said.
As mobile games have evolved, the entertainment community has a renewed respect for mobile gaming as more than simply an advertisement for a movie or a free-to-play game snack, DeWolfe says. Last year, SGN teamed with Fox for Book of Life: Sugar Smash, a game companion to the animated film Book of Life.
Top mobile game Clash of Clans provided much of publisher Supercell's $1.7 billion in revenue last year, proving that mobile video games can generate as much cash as that year's top theatrical release Transformers: Age of Extinction ($1.1 billion). "That shows how big an entertainment medium (mobile gaming) is," said DeWolfe, "and it’s the only one that is growing."
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