The maker of hit social and mobile game Candy Crush Saga, King Digital, experienced a disastrous stock market debut as it found its share price swiftly plummeting.
King had valued its shares at a rather optimistic $22.50 for its initial public offering, but the mood swiftly turned sour for the UK company.
Shares in King Digital had dropped to $19 by the end of the first day of trading - a whopping 16 percent loss. They continued to dip in after-hours trading.
Many feel that King’s IPO has been marred by investors’ previous experience with Zynga - another overnight mobile and social game phenomenon whose value swiftly plummeted when it came to the financial crunch. Zynga’s shares are currently half the price of their initial 2011 value.
Even worse than Zynga, which at least had a couple of hit games under its belt, King is yet to follow up its key hit Candy Crush Saga with another. Farm Heroes Saga, Pet Rescue Saga and Papa Pear Saga have all done reasonably well, but haven’t reached anything like the numbers of King’s breakout hit, which is played by around 93 million people worldwide.
The trouble is, the mobile gaming industry is an unpredictable beast. Literally no one foresaw the phenomenal success of Flappy Bird, an extremely simplistic and dauntingly difficult casual game made by solitary Vietnamese programmer Dong Nguyen.
This makes predicting the future earnings of a mobile developer - even one as well run and ruthlessly calculating as King - extremely tough, bordering on impossible.
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Via: The Guardian