Australian company Aristocrat Leisure has announced that it will acquire the Israeli social gaming company Plarium for an amount of $500 million.
The Herzliya-based Plarium has come to be known as one of the leading mobile gaming developers since its founding in 2009. It boasts over 1,200 employees around the world, with offices in Europe and the US.
The company's games are available for free on all social networks, Android and Apple devices.
It’s most popular game, “Vikings: War of Clans,” has been repeatedly ranked as one of the top-grossing strategy games since being launched.
Plarium CEO and cofounder Avraham Shalel, who will continue to lead Plarium after the acquisition, said of the deal: “I am very proud of the success we have achieved since establishing the business in 2009. The hard work and efforts of Plarium’s employees have positioned Plarium as a world class mobile game publisher. Aristocrat is an ideal partner for us given our common aspiration to be a global leader in social gaming, which will be accelerated through leveraging Aristocrat’s financial, strategic and operational resources."
Similarly, Aristocrat CEO and managing director Trevor Croker praised the deal. "The acquisition of Plarium allows Aristocrat to expand our addressable market into logical adjacent segments in the fast growing mobile social gaming market. This immediately expands our addressable market from US$3.2 billion in the Social Casino segment, to US$25.4 billion when including the Strategy, Casual and RPG segments. It also provides us a stronger platform to target the US$43.6 billion overall mobile and web games market as growth segments."
The deal is set to be completed by December 2017.