Activision Blizzard, the publicly-quoted California-based owner of lucrative game franchises such as Call of Duty and World of Warcraft, is to buy King Digital Entertainment, developer of the Candy Crush mobile games, in a deal worth $5.9bn.
Activision will pay $18per share in cash for King Digital, a 16% premium to the company’s closing price in New York last night.
King Digital, whose games attract more than 330m users every month and which will continue to be run as an independent entity, is currently headquartered in Dublin.
It’s not yet clear whether this may represent another so-called tax-inversion deal where part of the attraction of the acquisition is the lower corporate tax rate payable in Ireland than in the United States, as is partly driving the potential takeover of Allergan by Pfizer in the pharmaceutical sector.
Activision Chief Executive Officer Bobby Kotick discussed the scale of the deal, "We’re serving half a billion players a month,” he said, "Other than YouTube and Facebook, there isn’t a bigger network for entertainment."
