Who’s buying AppLovin’s games arm? According to Business Insider, it’ll be UK mobile game outfit Tripledot. We had heard similar rumours in the last few days, but were unable to verify the claims.
We broke the story a few weeks back that AppLovin is selling its 10 game studios to an undisclosed buyer for $900m.
The adtech giant said the deal was $500m in cash, with the remaining $400m in equity. AppLovin later confirmed in company filings that the studios were to be sold to a privately held company. The buyer could also borrow $250m to fund the deal, the filings said.
It turns out that buyer could well be Tripledot. Business Insider’s report backs up some of the rumours we had heard swirling around Tripledot in the last few days, but neither AppLovin or Tripledot responded to our queries about the acquisition. The Business Insider report says the same.
[Update 06/03: AppLovin has responded to our emails. “At this moment in time, AppLovin will not be commenting, but appreciate your interest,” a spokesperson told us. Tripledot has not responded as yet.]
As we reported in February, AppLovin announced it would be offloading its game studios in the earnings call following a blowout quarter.
It led to plenty of speculation around who the buyer might be – with many assuming that Scopely was poised to swoop for the firm given parent company Savvy Gaming Group’s $38bn M&A warchest.
We had also heard rumblings from our own sources in the last few days that the buyer was Tripledot, but we could not verify any of the claims we heard. Back in 2022, Tripledot said it had $116m to spend on M&A.
“We like the idea of taking a great game or concept, helping it to scale and turning it into a great business,” Tripledot CEO Lior Shiff told us at the time. “We’re looking at different sizes for acquisitions, different scales, including larger ones.”
AppLovin said last month that the deal for its studios Machine Zone, PeopleFun, Magic Tavern, Lion Studios, Belka, Athena, Clipwire, Leyi, Zenlife and Zero Gravity will close in the next quarter.
Foroughi said at the time: “I want to emphasize to our teams, you’ll soon be part of a company that specializes in and champions game development, while it’s bittersweet to part ways, we’re excited for your future and immensely grateful for your role in getting us to where we are today.”
It’s been a busy spell for AppLovin – alongside a wild rise in its stock price in the last six months off the back of two consecutive blowout quarters, it has attracted attention from two short seller groups who have made wild claims about the integrity of AppLovin’s business.
CEO Adam Foroughi hit back at the claims last week, saying the reports were “littered with inaccuracies and false assertions”.
Separately, on Monday Bloomberg reported that Tripledot cofounder and former COO Akin Babayigit is poised to launch a new $100m mobile game investment fund.
It’s called Arcadia Gaming Advisors, and filings on the UK’s Companies House register state that Berry Street Capital founder and CIO Orkun Kilic is also a director at the firm, alongside Babayigit.
Babayigit stepped away from his role as COO of Tripledot back in September 2024. The ex-Facebook exec said at the time: “In the process of becoming a large company, I’ve come to realize that my true “flow-state” is the ‘0-to-1’ phase of a company’s journey. That’s where I feel most energized and at my best.”
Bloomberg notes in its report that Babayigit is part of a close-knit group of Turkish founders who have had an outsized influence on the mobile games business in recent years.
