Tag: clash of clans

The success of several of these apps made it possible for earnings to break the $1.7 billion mark last year.

Supercell Oy, the company behind hit mobile games such as Hay Day and Clash of Clans, has managed to double its own earnings due to the continuing popularity of this kind of app throughout 2014, bringing its revenues to $1.7 billion, that year.

The company from Finland has actually seen a tripling of its earnings that are specific to its top games.

The annual revenue that the company brought in from its leading mobile games – Hay Day, Clash of Clans, and boom Beach – actually managed to triple in its growth, last year. Supercell explained that its earnings from last year had risen from having been a notably lower $570 million in 2013. While that figure was, obviously, still very healthy, this also shows a staggering increase over the span of a year. Its pre-tax earnings, before interest, depreciation, and amortization, were $565 million, last year. In 2013, that figure had been $267 million.

A great deal of the success of these mobile games came from certain specific markets around the world.

These markets – such as China and Korea – were exposed to highly localized and strategic mobile marketing campaigns that proved to be greatly successful and drew significant appeal. This type of achievement has proven to be a very challenging one for Western game developers in the past, said Ilkka Paananen, the co-founder and the chief executive at CEO, when speaking at a news conference.

SoftBank Corp, a telecom giant from Japan, purchased a 51.4 percent share of Supercell in October 2013 for $1.5 billion, an amount that they may now be considering to be a bargain, considering the consistent success and growth of the company, so far.

That company will be receiving a $170 million dividend payout from the mobile games firm as a result of the earnings that were brought in throughout 2014. This, according to data that has been made available by Supercell. It will be interesting to watch the success of the company to see whether it will be capable of maintaining this trend instead of allowing the achievement to become a flash in the pan.

Rovio Entertainment will be cutting up to 16 percent of staff due to lack of success.

The Finish video game developer and entertainment company that is well known for creating its smash mobile game hit, Angry Birds, will be eliminating up to 130 jobs at its home base in Espoo, Finland, located near the country’s capital Helsinki, due to a drop in profits, according to a statement made in a recent blog post by the company’s CEO Mikael Hed.

Rovio has approximately 800 employees worldwide.

The company boosted its staff and developed new games, such as Plunder Pirates and Amazing Alex after the success of Angry Birds, but its newer titles failed to be as popular. As a result, sales growth slowed and profits dropped as rival mobile games like Candy Crush Saga and Clash of Clans earned huge mobile gaming success.

In his post, the CEO said that “We have been building our team on assumptions of faster growth than have materialized.”

Back in 2010, the Angry Birds mobile game was the top-earning app in Apple’s US store.

Aside from being the best-earning app, the game’s many versions have totaled over 2 billon downloads. Rovio’s revenue doubled in 2012, but since then it has slowed as its new titles have been unable to climb to the top of the charts.

Rovio had wanted to avoid Zynga’s fate of relying too heavily on its game FarmVille for a great deal of its revenue, by expanding beyond its Angry Birds video game franchise. It also attempted to seek the success of Candy Crush and Clash of Clans by imitating certain features of these games, such as by including in-app purchasing. The in-game purchases of these two free-to-play games encourage gamers to continue spending a small amount to accelerate their game progress, instead of a one-time payment, which was the case with the majority of the Angry Birds iterations.

The mobile game industry is believed to be a future source of growth for Finland’s economy, but Rovio’s job cuts may have dampened this hope. In August, the company announced that at the end of the year, Mikael Hed will be joining the company’s board of directors and Rovio’s current chief commercial officer will be assuming Hed’s position.