The president and CEO on plans for growth – and why new games remain important even as evergreen mobile titles dominate
In February last year, the Swedish mobile giant MTG (Modern Times Group) acquired Plarium, maker of the hugely successful hero collecting game Raid: Shadow Legends, for a cool $620 million. But that's just the start, it seems.
"We set out the vision last year [that] post-acquisition of Plarium we want to double yet again in size," Maria Redin, CEO and president of MTG, tells GamesIndustry.biz. " And yes, we want to fuel and continue to drive organic growth, but in order to do that, we will need to do more acquisitions."
The timeframe for that doubling is ambitious: Redin says the plan is to achieve it in "about three to five years." But the Swedish firm has form in this regard. Redin says MTG set the same ambition in 2021 – "and I think we tripled."
Just a few years ago, the mobile sector was seeing rapid, double-digit growth, but that has now slowed to single digits: a sign of a rapidly maturing market. What was once a blue ocean has now turned decidedly red, and growing now means taking a bite out of another company's market share – or swallowing them whole.
Buying firms is the easy part, though – integrating them into your existing company is the difficult bit, and the games industry has seen plenty of horror stories of botched integration ultimately leading to studio closures.
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