King.com celebrated its 10 year anniversary just before Easter, and gave itself a little bit of rebranding. Now that we’re solidly out of the Web 2.0 era, King.com has dropped the .com, and is referring itself plainly as King. The new logo seems to harken back to its founding in Stockholm, as to my exhausted eyes the logo looks more like the Swedish word for King, Kung.
King may be an apt term – at ArcticStartup we’re not hearing a lot about new Facebook game publishers anymore, but according to AppData, King has risen to the number 2 MAU spot after Zynga on Facebook, with about half as many estimated monthly active users. We covered King last in January, where they were then the third place Facebook developer, after Microsoft.
The company boasts 150 games in 14 languages, and is now seeing 108 million players and 12 billion gameplays a month across its network stretching through online, mobile, and social games. Out of the 108 million players, they’re seeing 49 million on mobile.
With this growth, the company is understood to be gearing up for an IPO. King is a portfolio company of Apax Partners and Index Ventures.
“We have had lots of fun over the last 10 years making great games and we are honored to have acquired such a loyal fan-base. The exceptional growth of our mobile, Facebook, and cross-platform audience is a testament to the care and craft that goes into our games,” said Riccardo Zacconi, co-founder and CEO of King.
With the announcement, King has released two new ‘Saga’ titles, Papa Pear Saga, and Farm Heroes Saga, which seem to add more of a storyline to King’s previous physics and matching games.
