The president and CEO on plans for growth – and why new games remain important even as evergreen mobile titles dominate
In February last year, the Swedish mobile giant MTG (Modern Times Group) acquired Plarium, maker of the hugely successful hero collecting game Raid: Shadow Legends, for a cool $620 million. But that's just the start, it seems.
"We set out the vision last year [that] post-acquisition of Plarium we want to double yet again in size," Maria Redin, CEO and president of MTG, tells GamesIndustry.biz. " And yes, we want to fuel and continue to drive organic growth, but in order to do that, we will need to do more acquisitions."
The timeframe for that doubling is ambitious: Redin says the plan is to achieve it in "about three to five years." But the Swedish firm has form in this regard. Redin says MTG set the same ambition in 2021 – "and I think we tripled."
Just a few years ago, the mobile sector was seeing rapid, double-digit growth, but that has now slowed to single digits: a sign of a rapidly maturing market. What was once a blue ocean has now turned decidedly red, and growing now means taking a bite out of another company's market share – or swallowing them whole.
Buying firms is the easy part, though – integrating them into your existing company is the difficult bit, and the games industry has seen plenty of horror stories of botched integration ultimately leading to studio closures. But MTG has a plan.
MTG was already home to numerous mobile studios before the Plarium purchase, including InnoGames (maker of Forge of Empires), Snowprint (Warhammer 40,000: Tacticus), Hutch (F1 Clash), Ninja Kiwi (Bloons TD 6), and Futureplay (Merge Gardens).
The studios were organised into two "districts": the Casual District and the Midcore District (where midcore refers to titles halfway between casual and hardcore games). Those divisions have now been rebranded Playsimple (named after the India-based studio behind WordTrip) and Playamp, respectively, with the former comprising free-to-play, ad-driven titles, while the latter encompasses titles with in-app purchases (IAPs), which make up the majority of MTG's portfolio.
But the changes go beyond simple rebranding. Redin says the aim is to build "one of the leading gaming villages." The cosy-sounding choice of name is deliberate. "It is supposed to create something that people want to be part of," she says. In other words, the big focus is on employee retention and integration, something that's important for a company that has rapidly acquired so many studios.
"I always say gaming is the best marriage between creativity and data-driven decisions. So people are for sure one of our biggest assets, but then you also need to make sure you create an environment for them to thrive in. We buy our companies, which also means that we want the founders and the teams to stay on board post-acquisition, because that's when the true exciting story should start and you continue to scale the businesses. And I say the only way you can [make sure they] stay is if you create an environment which they enjoy."
Part of what's been going on behind the scenes since the Plarium acquisition is a standardisation of tech and tools across MTG, "because not everything needs to be built uniquely for every single company," says Redin. This standardisation drive has been the plan since Redin became CEO in 2020, but she says it wasn't until Plarium came on board that MTG had "the adequate scale to actually fully roll out the vision to reality."
We've seen the pitfalls of tech standardisation in the past. Electronic Arts' drive to get its studios to use the proprietary Frostbite engine caused no end of headaches for teams on titles like Mass Effect, for example. But Redin says she's aware that the tools needed for the Playsimple division differ hugely from those needed for the Playamp division, and the two have been treated separately.
"So Playsimple and their tech stack is going to be the foundation for future companies we onboard in the Casual District. And for Midcore, we actually have chosen some of the Plarium tech suite to [use] group-wide, but we're doing the rollout in a very selective way to make sure that the end game should always be better for all the companies. We've done a very thorough internal assessment on where it makes sense that we collaborate and share technical tools, and where it doesn't make sense."
Plarium's GoGame marketing platform and PDP data platform are being used across MTG, but Redin says MTG is also "adding features and functionality to it." The hope is that all this will improve the output of studios across the board. "We want to make sure that we put our efforts where we get the biggest bang for our buck," says Redin. "We have some amazing game makers across the group. And what we want to do now with Playamp is to really supercharge that with a tech suite that they can leverage on, where we are elevating everything that was already done."
In terms of technology at MTG, generative AI is making big waves, as it is across the mobile industry. As InnoGames told us earlier this year, all of the content for their mobile game Sunrise Village has been generated by AI for some time now, and the company is looking at "expanding AI content generation across InnoGames."
