King.com Limited is a video game developer based in St Julian’s Malta. The company operates as King and is also known as King Digital Entertainment. King specialises in creating social games, its most famous being Candy Crush Saga in 2012, one of the most successful games utilising the freemium model. King has over 2000 employees.

King was founded in 2003 by Riccardo Zacconi and Toby Rowland who worked on uDate.com, a successful dating website developed by Melvyn Morris. In 2003 uDate.com was the second largest site of its kind in the world and was sold to Match.com for $150 million.

Zacconi and Rowland joined Thomas Hartwig, Sebastian Knutsson Lars Markgren and Patrik Stymne to start a new company developing browser-based video games. The company was far from profitable in the beginning and only avoided bankruptcy with an angel investment on Christmas eve 2003, from Morris, who became chairman of King.

By 2005 King was turning a profit. In this year a large share was sold to Apax Partners and Index Ventures raising $43 million. Rowland left King in 2008 and went on to found Mangahigh a web portal for educational mathematics games.

King not only developed games for its web portal but also shared with web portals. By 2009 King had developed approximately 200 games and enjoyed a turnover of $60 million per annum. In 2011 both Rowland and former board member Klaus Hummels sold their shares back to King for $3 million each.

Zacconi announced in 2013 that a King IPO was a consideration. “The IPO is an option…..We are building the company and part of this is investigating options.”  The King IPO was filed in September 2013 and kept secret under the Jumpstart Our Business Start-ups Act. The King IPO was backed by Bank of America, Merrill Lynch, Credit Suisse and JPMorgan Chase & Co.

The King IPO was completed on 26 March 2014. The King IPO valued the company at $7.08 billion. Approximately $500 million was raised with the sale of shares. The King IPO was the largest ever for a social gaming company in the US. The company began trading on the New York Stock Exchange under the King symbol.

In February 2015 King acquired Seattle based mobile studio Z2Live. A year later in February 2016 King was acquired by Activision Blizzard for $5.9 billion. King continues to operate as its own entity led by Zacconi.