Plarium, the game development company behind Raid: Shadow Legends, has been acquired by Modern Times Group (MTG). In May 2024, Aristocrat Leisure Ltd., Plarium’s parent company, announced that they were selling the studio, leading to the recent acquisition by MTG.
The acquisition offers MTG significant scalability, opening multiple channels for synergies and adding a highly creative and commercially successful studio to its portfolio. Given Plarium’s strong growth trajectory in 2024, this addition is expected to substantially enhance MTG’s cash flow generation.
A performance-based earn-out structure of $30 million tied to 2025 revenue targets for RAID: Shadow Legends, which will be reflected on MTG’s balance sheet.
“I am proud and excited to welcome Plarium to MTG in this transformative deal, which elevates MTG into a leading European gaming group.
In Plarium, we have found a great partner to evolve and accelerate together. They bring an exciting and highly successful portfolio of live games spearheaded by RAID: Shadow Legends, an exceptional evergreen mid-core IP, to our line-up.
The studio also has three additional strong live games, and an exciting new games pipeline in both the mid-core and the casual segments, which creates healthy optionality for future growth.
“Plarium also has best-in-class tools for user acquisition and monetization. These tools will complement our own Flow Platform and boost the performance of some of our existing live titles.
Plarium is led by a strong, experienced and dedicated team that fits very well into our entrepreneurial and driven culture and I look forward to welcoming them to the group.”
MTG’s Group President and CEO Maria Redin
“One of the things that makes MTG unique is our ability to evolve. After divesting ESL Gaming for over SEK eight billion in 2022, we returned nearly SEK four billion to our shareholders and have been focused on continuing to find the right studios to join our group.
We reinvested part of the proceeds into buying Snowprint, which has more than delivered on our expectations. The acquisition of Plarium enables us to significantly accelerate our ambition to build a strong ecosystem that can support gaming companies, setting the stage for future growth.
All of this will be supported and enabled by strong and consistent cash flows. Our ambition has always been to build for the long term.
We are delighted to welcome Plarium into our Gaming Village, where their world-leading evergreen games can continue to shine. To put it simply – we are huge fans and we can’t wait to continue building our future together”.
MTG’s EVP of Gaming, Arnd Benninghoff
MTG’s future goals
The deal establishes the combined group as one of the world’s leading operators of highly profitable and cash-generative mid-core games with strong and well-known titles and strengthens MTG’s already highly successful casual games portfolio through the addition of Merge Gardens.
This elevates and diversifies MTG’s already deep and extensive portfolio with a unique set of global evergreen IPs.
Plarium’s Portfolio
Founded in 2009 in Israel, Plarium was acquired by Aristocrat in 2017. The studio currently holds 1,300 employees and is headquartered in Israel, with teams in Poland, Ukraine, Finland, and the rest of the world.
The studio’s most successful title is the genre-leading RAID: Shadow Legends. The game was launched in 2019 and is the highest-grossing turn-based role-playing game on the Google and Apple app stores. The RPG genre has approximately 10% market share of the total in-app purchase market in North America and Europe.
The studio’s other major titles include the strategy and city-building game Vikings, PVP battler Mech Arena and the casual title Merge Gardens. Together with RAID: Shadow Legends, these four titles generate around 90% of the company’s revenues. Plarium is also working on several new games to drive future organic growth.
The studio has also developed and successfully deployed two key performance acceleration tools that fit well with MTG’s own systems and strategy:
GoGame – a proprietary cutting edge User Acquisition (UA) and marketing platform that is fully integrated into Plarium’s IT infrastructure
PlariumPlay – an advanced direct-to-consumer platform that enables Plarium to monetize its games on PC and outside of the major mobile app stores
Both solutions are ready to be expanded to benefit our wider portfolio, to help MTG accelerate the performance of its existing games going in the future.
