Miniclip will acquire Subway Surfers maker Sybo
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Miniclip has agreed to acquire Sybo, maker of the smash mobile gaming hit Subway Surfers. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. But it’s a pretty big deal.
The move is a sign of consolidation in gaming, and it comes on the eve of the 10th anniversary of the launch of Subway Surfers. The game has become an evergreen title that has had more than three billion downloads since 2012.
In the last 18 months or so, Subway Surfers has seen its daily active users rise from around 15 million to 20 million a day to now 30 million or so a day, said Sybo CEO Mathias Gredal Nørvig, in an interview with GamesBeat. He credited the efforts to focus on live operations to keep players coming back. While he isn’t talking about the purchase price, as both companies are private, Gredal Nørvig said it is the biggest deal in European mobile games this year.
“It is indeed monumental. The founders have been really proud of what they managed to accomplish with Subway Surfers becoming the largest game, seeing how the market kept downloading, how the players kept loving, how the fans kept coming,” Gredal Nørvig said. “We’ve had a very nice ride and over the last couple of years have seen the teams running very fine by themselves. With the consolidation happening in the market, and all the increased user acquisition budgets, all the things happening around us, they wanted to explore what that it could mean, if we could find the right fit or the right home for Sybo going forward. What’s really important for us is finding a partner who saw where we wanted to go and could enable our
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