As reported by GamesBeat, Miniclip has agreed to buy Subway Surfers maker Sybo. The company staff has confirmed that they will improve the game by adding more chapters.
Saad Choudri, CEO of Miniclip, said the following in an interview with GamesBeat:
“Sybo is one of the jewels of the mobile gaming industry in terms of an IP generated from a mobile-first game. There are just a handful of those, like Angry Birds, and as a single game we know Subway Surfers is the biggest. We prioritize audience engagement as our No. 1 thing, and our entire vision and purpose is to be the world’s most popular games company. That is achieved squarely by what Sybo and the team are doing now with Subway Surfers.”
Sybo CEO Mathias Gredal Nørvig stated that the game’s daily users have increased from 15 million to 20 million in the last 18 months, and now it has reached 30 million.
“When they started the company, they never anticipated selling because getting to this level of self-driven teams is not something that we had envisioned. And I’ve been saying ‘no’ relentlessly, at least once a week, to a lot of potential buyers over the years because we have been a very successful as a quality-oriented company.”
After the acquisition, David Byrne, who joined the company as COO and Head of Games in 2018, will continue to work with the current management team. Names of this management team include Chief Commercial Officer and Head of Marketing Naz Amarchi-Cuevas, Chief People Officer Anne Schnack Hansen, and Finance Director Andreas Glenvig. Byrne, who will continue to serve as COO, has previously held senior management positions at companies such as Rovio.
Although the purchase price and details were not mentioned, according to an interview with GamesBeat, the CEO of Sybo stated that this is the biggest deal in Europe this year.
