Deconstructor of Fun

MARCH 7, 2023

The crew discusses Neil Long's App Store exposé in The Guardian, Rovio pulling the classic Angry Birds from distribution, Playtika suspending new game development, Street Fighter: Duel's launch and the explosive success of Hogwarts Legacy. Niklas Herriger is a former founder, whose company Gondola.io, was acquired by Tilting Point in 2019.

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Deconstructor of Fun

MARCH 31, 2023

Companies like Blizzard and Valve have been trying to make it happen for years and to some extent have already succeeded with products like the Wow Tokens or the Steam Workshop. As leaders, we tend to believe that we are responsible for everything that happens around us: company outcomes, actions, and behavior of others.

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Deconstructor of Fun

JANUARY 31, 2021

Post-COVID investment flows in Social and mobile gaming emerged as one of the best performing sectors during coronavirus, and the ensuing influx of investment will likely impact companies large and small. Among the most notable transactions was Playtika’s recent $14.6 As the big companies diversify, small companies will innovate.

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Deconstructor of Fun

APRIL 4, 2023

Alex Shea , Head of Publishing at one of the world’s most notable companies in the space, Voodoo, recently proclaimed the death of the genre during a talk at Pocket Gamer Connects London. “If In fact, he claims Homa continues to grow as a company. And it’s only a matter of time before Apple poots the kibosh on fingerprinting.

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Deconstructor of Fun

JULY 12, 2020

Supercell in Decline Earlier this month, Ilkka Paananen, Supercell’s CEO talked about key learnings from his company on their 10 year anniversary: 10 Learnings from 10 Years. Some common refrains: “If Supercell were a public company, their performance would be unacceptable” “They should try to be more like Zynga.”

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Deconstructor of Fun

JANUARY 17, 2023

Redecor (-28 %) was acquired by Playtika in the Reworks acquisition. Based on Linkedin, both acquired companies have shed lots of talent, which may explain at least part of the decline as not everything can be dumped on the worsening economic environment. Not-a-Fun-Fact: Design Home (-33%) was acquired by EA in the Glu acquisition.

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Deconstructor of Fun

DECEMBER 19, 2022

INVESTING / M&A Metaverse company Infinite Reality will go public through $1.85B SPAC Keywords acquires PR firm LabCom Jagex acquires Gamepires, studio behind Scum Turkish studio Pink Games has $1.2 LOVE IT | MEH | HATE IT Deconstructor of Fun Oy, Jääskentie , Espoo, Finland Unsubscribe

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Deconstructor of Fun

JANUARY 10, 2021

Hidden Object leaderboard remained largely the same : Wooga’s (Playtika) June’s Journey takes nearly 50% of all sub-genre revenue. This past year, some companies seem to understand this better than others. Last year it grew significantly with the launch of Among Us that became to many the lockdown game of the year.

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GamesIndustry.biz

JANUARY 11, 2024

Sign up for the GI Daily here to get the biggest news straight to your inbox Playtika will cut around 10% of its staff, resulting in redundancies of up to 400 people. As reported by CTech , the move will not affect the company's staff in Israel. Read more

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PreMortem.Games

JUNE 16, 2023

After its rapid rise to become Europe’s largest and most valuable game publisher, Embracer suffered a $2 billion loss on the eve of its most recent earnings and woke up this week to a company-wide restructuring plan. The plan had been to become an IP portfolio company and combine it with a slew of channels (e.g.,

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Deconstructor of Fun

JULY 24, 2023

You might know Playrix as the company that entered market segments dominated by King (Candy Sagas) and Supercell (Hay Day) only to beat both at what they are great at. The company was founded in the city of Vologda, Russia. Petersburg, the company was unable to attract key talent to relocate to Vologda. Source: Data.ai

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Deconstructor of Fun

JUNE 21, 2022

Noam: SuperPlay was founded in 2019 by an experienced founding team coming from Playtika, PlayStudios, and Rovio. It’s what any responsible gaming company would do. If you want to make sure you get all the details, I suggest listening to the full podcast. Tell me more about SuperPlay’s Dice Dreams. How did this hit game come to be?

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Deconstructor of Fun

FEBRUARY 23, 2023

Playtika recently made a bid for Angry Birds’ creator, Rovio. Angry Birds maker Rovio has entered preliminary discussions with interested bidders following a ‘surprise’ all-cash proposal worth approximately €750 million from Israel-based Playtika in January. But this wasn’t Playtika’s first offer. Missed a previous newsletter?

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Deconstructor of Fun

DECEMBER 27, 2022

We followed the Microsoft-Activision saga, watched Apple’s privacy changes rollout and read about blockchain gaming madness that saw self-proclaimed Web 3 companies pick up massive investments at nosebleed valuations. FTX on the other hand was lavishly funding blockchain gaming while holding assets for some of the companies.

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Deconstructor of Fun

FEBRUARY 3, 2020

While most of the reasons for this revolve around market size stagnation, target audience ageing and unsustainably high CPIs, Playtika’s downloads and UA investment trends of their cash cow Slots titles over 2019 definitely confirms these reasons. Playtika’s Slots portfolio downloads dropping….

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Deconstructor of Fun

NOVEMBER 10, 2020

What are the biggest challenges and mistakes made by early stage companies when first attempting to scale? How does Supercell become Supercell, Playtika become Playtika, or EA become EA? Why not ask some of the people who were there as founders, investors, and key executives at those very companies?

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Deconstructor of Fun

MAY 18, 2023

This week, now that the big news on Rovio is confirmed, we look at the question on the industry’s mind — what’s next for the company under Sega? Before the acquisition, Playtika had tabled a €750 million ($810 million) bid for Rovio, though talks collapsed last month with no reasons provided by either company. USD Rovio: 24.9M

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Deconstructor of Fun

MARCH 14, 2023

Katz went on to talk about the state of M&A and noted that where in previous years 80-85% of acquirers were publicly listed companies, in the last year that figure was around 20%, with many private buyers coming into play. He also urged founders to acknowledge that as their company scales, teams must change the way they work.

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Deconstructor of Fun

JANUARY 14, 2020

Close to the top there are companies, such as Jam City (Cookie Jam, Panda Pop) , Rovio (Angry Birds Dream Blast) , Tactile (Lily’s Garden) , AppLovin (Matchington Mansion, Clockmaker) and Storm8 (Home Design Makeover, Property Brothers ) making strides with a hit or two, yet remaining miles away from the top three.

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Deconstructor of Fun

APRIL 2, 2022

Google and DoF brought together the most influential gaming investors, companies, and talents in Istanbul! Understanding players and marketability have also become more important, leading to larger companies increasingly building content fortresses – in which they acquire a user and move them between games in their portfolio.

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Deconstructor of Fun

JULY 23, 2020

The valuations of these companies will drop rapidly. These market evolution catalyze large waves of investment into mobile gaming from sources of capital that don’t typically make equity investments into gaming companies. Smaller, single-game mobile gaming studios will see their growth trajectory obstructed completely and suddenly.

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Deconstructor of Fun

JANUARY 20, 2020

Same as Best Fiends, which grew gradually for about five years before getting acquired by Playtika. If N3TWORK fails to launch anything new in 2020 it is likely that the company will be acquired by a larger publisher. And when it comes to new games with IP that failed?

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Deconstructor of Fun

SEPTEMBER 28, 2020

It will be interesting to see if the follow-up title Combat Puzzle will cannibalize Empire & Puzzles Best Fiends keep on growing after Playtika acquired its developer, Seriously. Zynga’s Small Giant is quite steady despite the decline of installs.

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