Social casino game giant Playtika announced it has acquired Supertreat, the Austria-based creator of card games on mobile devices. The move is part of an ongoing plan to diversify across the $60 billion mobile games market.
The deal comes just weeks after Playtika acquired German casual game publisher Wooga for more than $100 million, and it’s a little more than a year after Playtika acquired Jelly Button Games.
As part of the acquisition, Playtika will add the successful “Solitaire Grand Harvest” app to its growing portfolio of casual game titles.
“Solitaire is one of the most evergreen single-player games and a very competitive category, but Supertreat cracked it and succeeded in creating one of the highest grossing solitaire games within just a year of its launch,” said Nir Korczak, chief marketing officer at Playtika, in a statement. “We are confident that by leveraging our live-ops, game economy, and performance marketing expertise we will make Solitaire Grand Harvest the number one solitaire game in the market.”
Financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed. Korczak said that what made Supertreat stand apart was that it had a product with remarkable retention — getting users to come back — within a year of its launch.
“The success of Solitaire Grand Harvest gave us the opportunity and flexibility to select our ideal partner to grow the game even further and we are thrilled to have chosen Playtika,” said Christian Baumgartner, CEO at Supertreat, in a statement. “They’ve proven multiple times that they know how to scale a game post-acquisition and we expect to see similar success for Solitaire Grand Harvest.”
Herzliya, Israel-based Playtika, meanwhile, was founded in 2010 by Robert Antokol, CEO, and Uri Shahak. The company’s Slotomania game was a hit, and gambling company Caesars Interactive bought the company at a valuation of $150 million in 2011. Slotomania still generates about $20 million to $22 million a month, according to a report by analyst firm Eilers & Krejcik Gaming.
Playtika shot to the top of the social casino games market, where it has a No. 1 market share with 28.6 percent of the total market and $372 million in third-quarter revenue, the analysts said. They noted that Playtika is more than twice the size of its nearest competitor, Aristocrat.
It’s no surprise that Playtika itself was acquired for a second time by a consortium led by China’s Giant for $4.4 billion in 2016.
Playtika has 22 million monthly active users playing its titles, and it now has more than 2,000 employees in 12 offices, including Tel-Aviv, London, Montreal, Chicago, Las Vegas, Santa Monica, Buenos Aires, Tokyo, Kiev, Bucharest, Minsk, Dnepr, and Vinnitsa. Supertreat has less than 20 employees.
