Enthusiast Gaming acquires Addicting Games for $35M

Enthusiast Gaming Holdings has acquired casual game publisher Addicting Games for $35 million.

The deal will assist the Toronto-based Enthusiast Gaming expand its media and content platform for video game and esports fans to connect and engage with every other, mentioned Enthusiast CEO Adrian Montgomery in an interview with GamesBeat.

The acquisition delivers on Enthusiast Gaming’s acquire-and-develop development method and expands the business into casual gaming to personal more month-to-month active customers and viewers inside the essential Gen Z and Millennial demographic.

“We’re super-excited about about this deal and about bringing Bill into his team into the fold,” Montgomery mentioned. “We’re trying to own the fan experience. And we’re trying to get as many deep relationships with as many gamers as we possibly can. And from an economic standpoint, we’re building out a flywheel. And so to have this company with this roster of titles, this developer talent, to be able to take these games and give them to our content creators and see what they can do to deepen the reach and make them more popular — I think it’s such a strategic fit for us to have access to this content and grow our loyal subscriber base and fan base to unlock new revenue streams.”

Addicting Games has been about for practically 20 years as a pioneer in casual gaming. It has a library of games spanning action, sports, puzzles and more, with in-app purchases out there on numerous titles. Addicting Games has followed a winding road but it has more than 10 million players a month playing its casual games, and that audience is quite large in an age of bid-price range games.

Games and portals incorporated in the acquisition contain Addicting Games, Shockwave, Type Racer, ioGames Space, Little Big Snake, Diep.io, EV.io, Mope.io, Math Games, and more than 1,000 immediate games.

Bill Karamouzis, the CEO and cofounder of Addicting Games, mentioned in an interview that combining Enthusiast Gaming’s scale and knowledge with his company’s properties and titles will improve engagement, drive new income possibilities, and provide the sources to create new titles and fan experiences.

“We’re game developers. And so everything we’re doing is around product and around the player. And that’s really what we focused on,” Karamouzis mentioned. “For almost 20 years we’ve done a deep dive when it comes to the player experiences. We’ve never really excelled at user acquisition. It’s just not something that we wanted to focus on. Enthusiast Gaming brings so many eyeballs. They have partnerships with influencers and content creators. They have marketing relationships and partnerships with major advertisers. It’s a nice marriage of the two talents between between the two companies. And so for us, we’re, we’re excited to get our products in front of their audience.”

Enthusiast Gaming has properties that focus on gaming media, talent, esports and experiences. Addicting Games has 28 staff, and Enthusiast Gaming has a 200 or so, not like contractors and talent. Montgomery mentioned the business will retain every person and it is focusing on development.

“In the big picture, this about incredible content and putting the power of content in the hands of an audience,” Montgomery mentioned. “We think about casual gaming and how fast it’s growing. When we think about mobile gaming, and how fast it’s growing, and how fast it’s growing among Gen Z’s and Millennials, and even people who are older than that. These are all favorable trends that we can take advantage of. What we’re exciting about as we start to work together with Bill and his team is look at phenomenon like Among Us — a very simple game that rocketed to superstardom because gamers got behind it and started playing it each and every night. It became a phenomenon because it was embraced by the creator community. Everything we do is rooted in communities, in gaming fans. When you take that content and pair it with our esports assets and creator assets, we can do lots of innovative things.”

Originally appeared on: TheSpuzz