UK-based mobile game developer Tripledot Studios secured $116m from investors including conglomerate Access Industries at a valuation of $1.4bn, VentureBeat reported yesterday.
Venture capital firm 20VC led the round with additional backing from fellow VC firm Lightspeed Venture Partners and investment firm Eldridge.
Founded in 2017, Tripledot produces puzzle and logic-based video games for mobile platforms and its portfolio includes Puzzletime, Woodoku, WordHop and Solitaire. It will use the money to build out that portfolio and explore strategic acquisitions, an increasing route to growth in the gaming industry.
Access Industries, Lightspeed Venture Partners and Eldridge are all returning investors, having taken part in Tripledot’s $78m series A round in April 2021 at a $500m valuation. The company had previously raised $8m in a 2018 round led by Velo Partners.
Tripledot Studios founder Lior Shiff told VentureBeat: “It is an interesting time in the games ecosystem and we have seen the biggest M&A transactions in mobile games.
“It is a great time for any company to raise money. For later-stage companies such as ourselves, we are fortunate that we enjoyed very high growth. It definitely helped us.”
Consolidations in the gaming sector are being driven by several factors, chief of which is the massive growth in revenue the industry saw throughout the covid-19 pandemic as consumers sought out home entertainment in unprecedented numbers.
The excess cash put gaming studios in a position where they can capitalise on other trends, such as the rise in subscription-based gaming services, meaning consolidation can lead to more titles available to users through a single subscription.
Video game group Electronic Arts (EA) bought mobile game publisher Glu Mobile in a $2.4bn deal in April 2021 that bolstered EA’s already large mobile game portfolio.
Media and video game holding company Embracer Group agreed in February to purchase mobile game developer Easybrain in a transaction sized at up to $765m, part of a trio of 2021 deals for Embracer that included the acquisitions of Borderlands developer Gearbox Entertainment for up to $1.37bn and Aspyr for $450m.
In January 2022 alone, M&A transaction volume in the the wider gaming space surpassed that of all combined deals in the sector in 2021. Those deals included software producer and Xbox game console producer Microsoft’s $68.7bn takeover of Activision Blizzard, which owns titles such as Call of Duty, World of Warcraft, Candy Crush and Guitar Hero.
The Activision Blizzard purchase was followed by the acquisition of video game developer Bungie by electronics manufacturer Sony, which owns the PlayStation gaming console, in a $3.6bn deal that will bring the Halo and Destiny game franchises under its umbrella.
Take-Two Interactive, the owner of game studios Rockstar and 2K Games, agreed to acquire social media game developer Zynga for $12.7bn the same month.
Image courtesy of Tripledot.
