This. In five years another one-hit wonder will rise and take the place of Candy Crush. I don't know how much time will Activision need to recover that money, but I'm sure they will put this game on consoles too (and probably handhelds) to expand their userbase, even though it would be insignificant compared to the mobile crowd.

King's former owner is now swimming in cash, Uncle Scrooge style. He got the best deal since Microsoft buying Minecraft, and arguably this one is better, due to Minecraft being a solid monolith in gaming now and CC being a mobile title that will be replaced and forgotten in a decade.

Not a great strategic move IMO, or at least way too expensive.

King is Candy Crush dependent, they tried and tried again to launch other games, but keep failing and can't make another really successful franchise. And we know that mobile gaming is versatile, Candy Crush can disappear in a few month if another game becomes the "IT" thing. The King model is not sustainable at all.

Remember Zynga? Yeah, me neither.

EDIT : Ah, others said the same thing, didn't see that ^^. 

Now that i think about it, the Minecraft purchased by Microsoft is just a bargain compare to this :P.

Good luck activision, lol.

So Activision has a huge stable of the biggest brands in gaming... and almost all of them are godawful. They truly are the Burger King of gaming companies.

pretty great price... besides the billion in revenue the game itself makes, the access to the install base of 500+million and ~100 million active users is worth it.. if they can get 2%, 3% to buy other activision titles with ingame ads and promotion it totally worth it .. spam those mothers to get skylanders for their kids

considering they sold over 210 million in ten years and over 219 total on here with e few release before I'd say they could make a very strong argument for that. They didn't say all time otherwise some franchises would have them beat from longevity. Though they are ahead of GTA in total sales and might pass all pokemon games combined this year including spin offs the gap is about 25 million on here. Super Mario has them beat by about 95 million on here but that has been dropping  substantially each year and took almost an extra 20 years to achieve.

Edit: and one more thing, if they consider just home consoles and not home consoles and handhelds. Then it is the best selling franchise.

I think the Mario series would like a word with you... in the past 10 years alone every Mario game from spinoffs (not including the Smash series) to main series has sold 270+ million copies. That's more then the COD series as a hole and with COD each game sale, there is a cut between the console maker and Activision themselves, where about Nintendo will take a majority of the money from a Mario game. Also you gotta take into note that Nintendo's first party games most the time stay near retail prices where COD's price tag is cut in half within 3 to 4 months after launch. I'd give the crown to Mario myself.

Yipeeee more players for Derby County :)

It had to happen someday. It's like one animal eating another big one: even if it's dangerous for them, they believe they could eat it and they do so to gloat to its peers, but it's gonna have a painful death eventually due to it.

Damn... people just throwing away billions like it was candy (pun not intended?).

Oh. Shit. I'm doomed.