There’s more going on under the hood at Miniclip than those splashy deals for Sybo, FuturLab and, most recently, Easybrain.
Miniclip has also acquired – but not formally announced – some smaller studios in the last few years, and also quietly orchestrated the success of puzzler Triple Match 3D, releasing the title through its alt label, Boombox Games.
We spoke to Miniclip CEO Saad Choudri just as the ink dried on his latest deal, a $1.2bn swoop for evergreen casual game-maker Easybrain. He seemed comfortable, possibly even pretty happy, with our suggestion that Miniclip could be described as the ‘quiet giant’ of mobile gaming.
“We’ve been doing our work, just doing our thing and letting the audience tell us where we have done well and were we have failed,” says Choudri.
“Of course, we are part of Tencent, but not having the pressure of the public quarterly announcements means that we can make long term decisions to ensure the best for our players and essentially let the games speak for themselves.”
Choudri says Miniclip will continue to look at “both inorganic and organic growth”, and despite a tough climate for new launches overall, Miniclip is “launching more games than ever before”.
On those new titles, he cites 2023’s Triple Match 3D as a particular success. “We believe there is still the potential to build new successful games, but we need to ensure the investment in new games is balanced with appropriately supporting the existing portfolio,” he says.
“I see you cover a lot of our soft launches, and there’s some big releases coming, potentially – Sybo has got a big one coming up. Our internal studios are developing a lot of games, so it’s not a strategy of just acquisitions and keeping everything else as a live title.”
Evergreen franchises like 8 Ball Pool, Online Soccer Manager and Carrom Pool are also “really big games” that have been performing well for years, says Choudri. There are also new PC and console games coming from Powerwash Simulator maker FuturLab, too, another recent acquisition.
Its latest buy, Easybrain, “is the epitome of a good mobile game business”, says Choudri. The firm has “a great, deep portfolio of ad supported, evergreen games” and the $1.2bn deal shows that Miniclip is trying to cover all the bases in terms of monetisation.
Choudri estimates that even before the Easybrain deal, ad revenue represented over 30% of the Miniclip group’s revenue. “We monetized primarily through ads when we were a web business, and we’ve always had ads in our of DNA, but in the last few years, we have definitely improved our footprint in the ad space with the acquisition of Sybo and some other acquisitions we’ve done as well.”
“We’re bringing something for everybody and I think that gives us a lot more capacity to ride the peaks and troughs of the industry,” Choudri continues. “When there’s a macro tailwind somewhere and there’s a headwind somewhere else, usually we’re okay and we can navigate that because we’ve got a sizeable portfolio to do that.”
“I think what we’ve seen is as the market has become more difficult, some hero games are really doing well on IAP. We’re lucky to have one in 8 Ball Pool, which has been there for a while, but now there’s Triple Match as well,” adds Choudri.
“Clearly it is harder for games to break through unless you have something which really cuts through the noise, and when you do get there you will need to have a substantial UA budgets. What we’ve seen with evergreen games and ad-supported games is that they’re a good hedge against that.”
