Addicting Games has acquired the online creature survival game Mope.io, a web and mobile game with more than 72 million players to date.
The move is part of a revival that Addicting Games, which has followed a winding road but is back as a maker of simple casual games that you can play on the web or on mobile devices when you want to zone out or learn some things. It may sound too simple in this age of big-budget games, but Addicting Games draws more than 10 million players a month.
It’s one of the ironies of the wheel of the game business that Addicting Games, which was once bought and passed around, is now back in the business of acquiring games.
The Santa Monica, California-based company didn’t disclose the purchase price, but it did say the deal was more than “seven figures.” Mope.io is a top-down multiplayer animal survival game. The deal will make Mope.io an exclusive part of Addicting Games’ offerings and marks the latest chapter in the platform’s content growth strategy following the success of its flagship hit title, LittleBigSnake, which happens to be the No. 1 game in Indonesia, among other places.
Mope.io was developed by Stan Tatarnykov and it puts users in the role of a tiny creature surviving in a world of player-character helmed predators. Players forage for food, avoid getting eaten, and progress up the food chain, unlocking new abilities and eventually becoming an apex predator animal. The more powerful players get, the bigger the target on their backs.
Above: Mope.io has 72 million players.
This kind of game doesn’t grab headlines. Bill “Kara” Karamouzis, CEO of Addicting Games, said in an interview that the deal is part of a plan to keep growing the company’s user base. Kara said that Mope.io has 65 million unique players on the web and seven million on iOS and Android. Addicting Games will use its development resources and capital to improve the game’s features and optimize functionality to create a more in-depth and engrossing creature survival experience.
A long history
If Addicting Games sounds a little bit familiar, it has been around a long time. Karamouzis was the original founder of Addicting Games in 2000, when it also went by FPS Networks. It was acquired by Atom Shockwave, one of the original makers of games based on Macromedia’s Shockwave and Flash players, and became part of Atom Entertainment.
In 2006, Viacom’s MTV Networks bought Atom Entertainment, including Shockwave and Addicting Games. Karamouzis stayed on for a while and then left to start a new company, Hallpass Media, a social gaming portal which was acquired in 2011 by MindJolt, the predecessor company of Jam City. Karamouzis stayed for two years at Jam City and then left to start a new startup, TeachMe.com, a maker of math and other educational games.
“We learned a lot about analytics at Jam City and applied that to educational games,” Karamouzis said.
In 2014, Defy Media acquired GameTrailers, Addicting Games, and Shockwave from Viacom. In 2018, Defy Media imploded.
“As they were imploding I reached out to their CEO and they had already fired their engineering team and Shockwave was for sale,” Karamouzis said. “He said, ‘We can’t support it.’ We said, ‘We built this and so we don’t need any support. Just give it to us.’ They were heavily in debt and we were able to give them money to extend their runway for a couple of months.”
Karamouzis drove to the company in Beverly Hills. And he picked up a server that put Addicting Games (and Shockwave) back in business.
Above: Bill Karamouzis is CEO of Addicting Games.
“One of their engineers brought a physical server out and put it in the trunk of my car, the same day that security took over the entire building,” Karamouzis said. “It was a pretty crazy. It was the craziest acquisition we had done.”
The company now has more than 5,000 games from hundreds of independent developers. Since 2018, the company has been finding and publishing titles with promising developers. And if they grow quickly, Addicting Games will buy them outright, as is happening with Mope.io. The company launches more than a dozen games a week. Most of them are HTML5 games, which can run on the web or on mobile devices, as the original Flash platform is dying off. Addicting Games has been converting many of the old Flash titles to HTML5.
“We’re working down the list,” Karamouzis said.
Addicting Games has a $1.5 million convertible note (a loan that can be converted into shares in the company) from Toronto-based Enthusiast Gaming, and it has used that to expand. The company has 21 employees now, it is profitable, and will likely hit $5 million in revenues.
Titles include Fratboy Girlfriend TD, Pencil Racer, LittleBigSnake, and 50 States. Meanwhile, the TeachMe.com property had a big hit with its math game, MathGames.com, which is now being used in schools by kids working on Chromebooks. The game is enjoying a resurgence during the pandemic, as kids are forced to learn on computers and TeachMe.com’s games can make learning math online fun. Roughly 80,000 kids played daily.
“We have this crazy home environment and parents don’t have time to watch their kids the way a teacher would,” Karamouzis said.
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