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How King built one of the strongest businesses in gaming — and what we learned from its IPO filing

  • Posted byby Dean Takahashi
  • Updated
  • 8 min

King disclosed its financial results today as part of a filing to raise $500 million in an initial public offering. The disclosure gives a real picture of the financial state of the European company behind the smash mobile gaming hit Candy Crush Saga.

King said that it had profits of $568 million on revenues of $1.884 billion for 2013, compared to profits of only $7.8 million on revenues of $164.4 million in 2012. The success of one game and the huge growth of casual gaming on smartphones and tablets are largely responsible for this huge difference. The ability to play games anytime and anywhere is causing rapid expansion of the gaming audience.

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Written by

Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.