Why King’s disruptive CEO is happy with his new traditional-gaming overlord

Posted byby Dean Takahashi
November 4, 2015
Updated June 18, 2025
4 min

Call of Duty, StarCraft, and now Candy Crush Saga. Activision Blizzard’s $5.9 billion purchase of King Digital Entertainment means that it will have a huge spread of game intellectual properties and one of the broadest audiences for gamers in the world.

Combined, Activision Blizzard and King will have access to more than 500 million monthly active users in 196 countries and will be second only to China’s Tencent in estimated 2015 revenue. This is why Riccardo Zacconi, chief executive of King, decided to sell his company. We caught up with Zacconi for an interview on Tuesday to talk about the merger and what it means for the competitive landscape of gaming.

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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.