British game developer King has filed documents to go public and it hopes to crush Wall Street with a $500 million IPO.
On Tuesday, February 18, King.com filed its F-1 form with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for the company to release its IPO. King plans to trade on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) under the ticker symbol "KING." The company did not confirm the stock's IPO price.
Candy Crush Saga became very popular after it released on Facebook in April 2012. Candy Crush Saga also made its way to iPhones and iPads in November 2012 and then reached Android devices in December 2012.
In the IPO filing with the SEC, King said that in December 2013 around 128 million gamers played the company's games more than 1.2 billion times a day. Candy Crush Saga makes up a significant portion of these numbers as King reported that the game has 93 million daily active users who played the game 1 billion times a day. Candy Crush Saga has been downloaded more than 500 million times since its launch. Even though the game is available as a free download, it allows in-app purchases.
King also claims that in Q4 2013 around 73 percent of its gross bookings were derived from mobile devices.
"We believe we have a repeatable and scalable game development process that is unparalleled in our industry," reads the document filed by King. "In the last decade, we have developed a catalog of more than 180 game IPs, which we continuously expand. We refer to our game IP as the intellectual property assets that includes its name, game play mechanic, visual expression, graphics and design. We introduce new game IPs in a tournament format on our royalgames.com website, where we are able to gather rapid feedback from a subset of our sophisticated, highly engaged player base, which we refer to as VIPs."
The success of Facebook's and Twitter's IPOs may have tempted King to go public. However, Farmville's maker Zynga released its IPO in 2011 and since then the share price has nearly halved.
The IPO filing comes amid reports that the International Game Developers Association (IGDA) wasn't too happy with King's recent acquisition of the "candy" trademark. The IGDA said it strongly opposes the move as it jeopardizes the position of other game developers who may have used the word "candy" in their games. The association said it will closely investigate King's move. "While we understand and respect the appropriate exercise of Trademark rights, King's overreaching filing in its application for the Trademark for its game 'Candy Crush Saga,' and its predatory efforts to apply that mark to each separate word contained in that name, are in opposition to the values of openness and cooperation we support industry wide" said Kate Edwards, IDGA's executive director, in a statement, adding that it contradicts King's approach to IP.
J.P. Morgan, Credit Suisse Securities and BofA Merrill Lynch will lead the offering, which is expected to raise $500 million.
