Nonstop Games has taken a few big bets in their past, but it seems it’s all worked out for them with the news this morning that King has acquired the company for what others are writing as €70 million, but I only calculate as $90 million (€67.3 million)
According to King’s earnings call, King acquired 100% of Nonstop’s equity for $6 million upfront and “up to $84 million of contingent consideration based upon criteria linked to revenues from games developed,” meaning that Nonstop now has a new #1 priority of extracting cash from their games.
Additionally $16 million of that $84 million will go to certain Nonstop employees over a 4 year period, regardless of the revenues coming out of their titles. The press release also mentions an upfront payment was made to certain Nonstop Games employee shareholders of $10 million “which relates to their continued employment over a one year period subsequent to the acquisition date.”
The first big bet for Nonstop was that they could leverage HTML5, which was an unproven new technology when the company was founded, to create world-class games. Secondly it was a big bet for founders Teemu Ikonen, Henrik Karlström, Juha Paananen and Henric Suuronen to move the company to from their native Finland down to Singapore.
The acquisition news came as King, now a publicly traded company on the NYSE, announced their second quarter earnings call.
Nonstop has produced a few minor hits in the past, which now seem to be scrubbed from their “Games” page. These include Dollar Isle, a city builder; and Paint Stars, sort of a Draw Something clone. Now they seem to be focused on Heroes of Honor, a real-time strategy game available for iOS and Facebook, as well as a new title said to be released in 2015.
Nonstop has been supported most recently by a €2.2 million round led by Creandum and Lifeline Ventures, back in March of 2013.
The acquisition went down like this, to Nonstop’s blog:
“When we started talking more in depth, we discovered how similar the two companies were in terms of values and in their approach to creating games. Both Nonstop Games & King value teams with high level of independence, are passionate about creating games and encourage individuality.
As the talks progressed, we felt that King would be the natural home for Nonstop Games and would help us reach our ambitions of creating global games, so we’re now taking the next big leap with King.
All the founders and employees of Nonstop Games will stay, and we will continue to work on great new titles. We will continue to operate Heroes of Honor as before.”
