This is more idle speculation but King may have the patented the specific techniques and systems to gather and monetize user data. I would also imagine that King's techniques to do are a closely guarded trade secret (similar to Google's search algorithms) so simply trying to hire people from King may not necessarily be enough.

With regards to Activision's mobile team; if they also want to make a bigger and deeper push into the mobile market it may in the long run be cheaper to actually buy out a company with established brand recognition and market expertise, as opposed to trying to build up their existing mobile division.

No, I mean tax inversion, a way of changing where a company is headquartered for tax purposes. Ireland has fairly low corporate taxes.

Brace yourselves. The shameless cash grabs are coming.

Ah, I stand corrected -- never heard of that term until now.

The things you can learn on a gaming forum!

Well their Q1 revenue för this year alone was 567 million so as whole they should BE over 1 billion revenue för the whole year. http://venturebeat.com/2015/05/14/candy-crush-saga-maker-king-beats-wall-streets-expectations/

I also had a look. The revenue is something like gross bookings, so you have to subtract expenses, taxes, ... and end up with earnings around $200 million per quarter or about $600-800 million per year, but rather stagnating since 2013 which is not a good sign.

I found the website where KING publishes its data:
http://investor.king.com/investors/financial-information/quarterly-reports/default.aspx
http://investor.king.com/files/Form-20-F_v001_r027z2.pdf

The buying price is only around 8-10 times the yearly profit, so Activision actually got KING relatively cheap, although probably still paid some billions too much.

Will it bring much in the end? For $6 billion you could create a lot of good games and probably at least 10 Candy Crush clones if you wanted too.

Higher coporate taxes are in principle possible for every country. It was the case in the past until (stupidly) countries tried to make the tax system easier but only achieved to make it more unfair (probably due to lobbying and bribery of the corporations). Before you had to pay taxes for the business you conducted in a country, now you pay taxes in some country of your choice where you artificially put your headquarter and you avoid paying many taxes at all.

Basically the principle must be that each business pays taxes where it's customers are, not where it itself is residing. Very simple and clean. This way every country can decide how strongly to tax. And the countries should have the stronger stick. At the end they can for example threaten Google that they will forbid Google to conduct business in their location, if Google does not comply and hand over the taxes. That's also why I really like that GOG now pays VAT in the country of the consumer - I think GOG before actually did fraud. And Apple should pay billions of dollars of taxes each year in Europe alone - but they don't - this makes me mad and hating Apple.

So, I think there solutions are not too difficult, possible and not dependent on every country doing the same. Nobody needs to be forced outside of your country, but only inside the tax rules must be changed. Why this is not yet fully done many years ago - I don't know. Must be that politicians are all corrupt and bought by the corporations.

For the financial transaction tax this is a bit more difficult. It's more effective, the more countries take part in it. But even if just a bunch of countries start with it they will feel an impact. They cannot force others, but they can surely make trade agreements and other stuff dependent on an agreement on the TOBIN tax. So this is more difficult, and looking at the TTIP negotiations you rather get the impression that standards are to be lowered, not raised - which is rather sad. But in principle these negotiations would be the best chance to convince others.

For example you would think that London as an important financial market place is holy to the UK, but it isn't. A possible EU exit next year is threatening the position of London and in possible negotiations after the exit one could demand even more regulations of offshore tax heavens for example.

It's all not easy, but I'm convinced more can be done than is done now, because in principle countries have more pull because they can forbid businesses to conduct business if they do not comply with their rules. It doesn't mean you force others though. This is an important distinction.

Application of this principle for example on Luxembourg would read: If companies want to pay in Luxembourg - fine, but they also have to pay in France, Germany, Italy, ... and this means that in the end there is no advantage anymore of paying in Luxembourg, so they will only pay in Luxembourg what business they do there, which should not be very much and people in Luxembourg have to find real jobs (outside of the money tax evasion business) but people from all the other nations will benefit from the higher taxes and even corporations of the other nations (those who cannot do the same) will benefit from a fairer taxation.

.. This may have been a bit OT for the thread but you asked.

I wonder how quickly Activision will run this into the ground?

Edit: Amazing how the company that produced cheap games for the Atari 2600 has technically long outlasted the original Atari. Even more amazing that people don't realize Atari is on its nth iteration now.

I think they bought it mostly because of the product infrastructure rather than brand. If King has proves something, it's that their pipleline is good at churning out stuff as long as they find the next one that sticks on the wall.

The way I see it is, that Activision is going more and more in mobile, so instead of paying someone outsourcing fees, they just get all tools they need for their own inhouse pipleline from King and will shut them down in a couple of years.

As a hobby game dev i struggle to understand the phenomenon of Candy Crush and how can people shell out so much for microtransactions in it.

It's not really surprising. A strong corporation vs a weak government and that's the practice, there's the principle too. Corporations are supposed to increase revenue whereas governments can only transfer money from one place to another (excluding state owned companies).

While I think it's ridiculous that so many people enjoy these games that the companies that produce them are are being sold for so much I still think it's weird that people are bothered by the sum especially if they know nothing of corporate finance. It's business and the people involved obviously think it's going to pay off.

Sounds about the same as to what I said.