Biz Daily: Mag Interactive's purchase of Delinquent

hello and welcome to the biz daily today we're talking about the news that mag interactive has bought delinquent now these two mobile game developers you've probably not heard of you're probably thinking kind of this is not the biggest news of the day um and maybe it's not the biggest issues of the day but um sometimes we like to kind of pick apart small and use items to look at some trends so to kind of go back on the facts so mac interactive is a swedish developer and they're best known for the word game russell um and to go back in history it's kind of quite interesting that mag interactive were were not a well-known game verb at all they were kind of one of the kind of first breed of of a kind of game developers certainly in europe to kind of pick up on on iphone smartphone development um so uh razzle russell came out in 2012 um and usually just in swedish it was

very successful in sweden and so it's a head-to-head game a bit like a kind of a bobble type game where where you have a kind of a set a grid of words and you have to make as many words as possible um after that kind of secret um and as time's gone on they've kind of gone from iphone to ipad they've added more languages um and they've kind of recently released a more kind of i guess kind of a kind of not such a head-head version of a more kind of like a a a candy crush saga type type type of pro with a russell adventure and they've kind of been um sitting there in in sweden and they've kind of been making this kind of game and improving it and adding more languages um supporting it and they've been very successful and it's kind of interesting because uh originally it was kind of an ad funded game or you could buy a um you could kind of bike to get rid of the ads um it wasn't a kind of heavy monetization game in terms of how we understand free to play games now um because you just can't really do with that gameplay um but they've had 50 million downloads now and they have

quite a high retention of players um obviously people tend to be playing it but when people start they tend to play against kind of friends that they know and then depending on the the skill level they might move on to um also play against just other players who are at the same skill level so you have that kind of nice mixture um but i think it's something we kind of sometimes forget uh when we're covering the kind of the supercells and the gung-ho's and the uh machine zones of the world there are a lot of um small developers i mean uh maggie tracy would not say that they're a large team um but they're doing a very good business there um and they have a very strong presence in in that niche market of word games and they have a really good business and that's now allowing them um to kind of branch out so they did do some uh they do some venture investment a couple years ago but they raised them six million dollars so depending on it's not a normal sum of money equally it's not a small amount of money um and they actually invested in delinquent um when delinquent kind of um

announced itself so to go into a bit more um information on delinquent the delinquent is one of those teams um which is stuff full of veterans so the ceo used to work at pop cap david bishop quite well known and um he he was quite senior in popcap in ireland where they did all their mobile development so he's worked on things like plants wrestling zombies and you know all the kind of um all the pop-up games and equally someone else who was um one of the co-founders of delinquent was uh david moore who is quite well known um because he was one of the uh founders of um relentless games in brighton um and they did a lot work for sony most famously kind of the buzz series of games of her playstation but lots of other things as well um there's a few other kind of it's kind of a veteran kind of game types who have been rounded in with delinquent and delinquent haven't really actually released their first game yet it's a game called a potion pop so that's a match three game they've been in soft launching that's been in software for a long period of time

so you might see kind of a one scheme of things quite two quite small companies kind of on one one by the other you know it's not a world chattering headline but i think it is interesting you're kind of seeing now where we are in mobile games we are very much entered in the west at least a mature phase so there's some of these companies like uh maggie interactive they've been around now successfully um for like four years or getting for four years making money getting investments understanding the business and now you're kind of seeing the easiest way for them to pick up new talent it's not to build a new team um that's quite expensive it's actually easier for them to look around and say who can we buy who's got good ip who's got good games that are coming out and build their company that way now that's what we're seeing we're not really seeing so much of these kind of like kind of teams start up and launching and being very successful in fact we've seen dude we were seeing nothing but we're seeing some quite well funded teams launching very big games and not really going anywhere yeah the public that's very expensive now to enter the market i mean one of the reasons um the delinquent were quite happy to to um to be acquired uh by mag

is is that the roswell game has created such a big network of users for them so they have to spend a lot of money on user acquisition i mean they might do but um to launch they immediately have a kind of a network of people who they know play a certain type of game and who probably will like their mastery game so you're kind of seeing i think now we're kind of seeing this kind of kind of coalescing of of um kind of mature mature markets mature companies um and much less space really maybe for the startups whereas maybe like two or three years ago we would look at delinquent and like they're going to come up with the next big game um it's very difficult now for small startups to kind of enter that phase it's very big but very hard for big startups as well so that's something where we've seen this trend where we're seeing the companies who have been successful in the space they're the ones who are now kind of growing and kind of expanding their their success um i think that's a trend that we're going to see for the next couple of months and then and probably years so that was the

the news for today i hope to see you tomorrow