In February last year, the Swedish mobile giant MTG (Modern Times Group) acquired Plarium, maker of the hugely successful hero collecting game Raid: Shadow Legends, for a cool $620 million. But that’s just the start, it seems.
“We set out the vision last year [that] post-acquisition of Plarium we want to double yet again in size,” Maria Redin, CEO and president of MTG, tells GamesIndustry.biz. ” And yes, we want to fuel and continue to drive organic growth, but in order to do that, we will need to do more acquisitions.”
The timeframe for that doubling is ambitious: Redin says the plan is to achieve it in “about three to five years.” But the Swedish firm has form in this regard. Redin says MTG set the same ambition in 2021 – “and I think we tripled.”
Just a few years ago, the mobile sector was seeing rapid, double-digit growth, but that has now slowed to single digits: a sign of a rapidly maturing market. What was once a blue ocean has now turned decidedly red, and growing now means taking a bite out of another company’s market share – or swallowing them whole.
Buying firms is the easy part, though – integrating them into your existing company is the difficult bit, and the games industry has seen plenty of horror stories of botched integration ultimately leading to studio closures. But MTG has a plan.
A fresh look
MTG was already home to numerous mobile studios before the Plarium purchase, including InnoGames (maker of Forge of Empires), Snowprint (Warhammer 40,000: Tacticus), Hutch (F1 Clash), Ninja Kiwi (Bloons TD 6), and Futureplay (Merge Gardens).
The studios were organised into two “districts”: the Casual District and the Midcore District (where midcore refers to titles halfway between casual and hardcore games). Those divisions have now been rebranded Playsimple (named after the India-based studio behind WordTrip) and Playamp, respectively, with the former comprising free-to-play, ad-driven titles, while the latter encompasses titles with in-app purchases (IAPs), which make up the majority of MTG’s portfolio.
But the changes go beyond simple rebranding. Redin says the aim is to build “one of the leading gaming villages.” The cosy-sounding choice of name is deliberate. “It is supposed to create something that people want to be part of,” she says. In other words, the big focus is on employee retention and integration, something that’s important for a company that has rapidly acquired so many studios.
“I always say gaming is the best marriage between creativity and data-driven decisions. So people are for sure one of our biggest assets, but then you also need to make sure you create an environment for them to thrive in. We buy our companies, which also means that we want the founders and the teams to stay on board post-acquisition, because that’s when the true exciting story should start and you continue to scale the businesses. And I say the only way you can [make sure they] stay is if you create an environment which they enjoy.”
Part of what’s been going on behind the scenes since the Plarium acquisition is a standardisation of tech and tools across MTG, “because not everything needs to be built uniquely for every single company,” says Redin. This standardisation drive has been the plan since Redin became CEO in 2020, but she says it wasn’t until Plarium came on board that MTG had “the adequate scale to actually fully roll out the vision to reality.”
We’ve seen the pitfalls of tech standardisation in the past. Electronic Arts’ drive to get its studios to use the proprietary Frostbite engine caused no end of headaches for teams on titles like Mass Effect, for example. But Redin says she’s aware that the tools needed for the Playsimple division differ hugely from those needed for the Playamp division, and the two have been treated separately.
“So Playsimple and their tech stack is going to be the foundation for future companies we onboard in the Casual District. And for Midcore, we actually have chosen some of the Plarium tech suite to [use] group-wide, but we’re doing the rollout in a very selective way to make sure that the end game should always be better for all the companies. We’ve done a very thorough internal assessment on where it makes sense that we collaborate and share technical tools, and where it doesn’t make sense.”
Plarium’s GoGame marketing platform and PDP data platform are being used across MTG, but Redin says MTG is also “adding features and functionality to it.” The hope is that all this will improve the output of studios across the board. “We want to make sure that we put our efforts where we get the biggest bang for our buck,” says Redin. “We have some amazing game makers across the group. And what we want to do now with Playamp is to really supercharge that with a tech suite that they can leverage on, where we are elevating everything that was already done.”
AI
In terms of technology at MTG, generative AI is making big waves, as it is across the mobile industry. As InnoGames told us earlier this year, all of the content for their mobile game Sunrise Village has been generated by AI for some time now, and the company is looking at “expanding AI content generation across InnoGames.”
Redin says this is a common pattern in the mobile space, where AI processes are being embedded into games. “I would say for most parties I speak to in the industry, I think that we all are having similar discussions on how we are embracing new technology in our production chain,” she says, adding that generative AI is “significantly more powerful than any other tool that we got access to before.”
“I think we are all trying to find our ways of how to strike the right balance for it. How are you changing your workflow? Where do you not change the workflow? How do we find areas to do more? Because at the end of the day, it comes back to leveraging new tech to actually make our games more relevant for the players. And in a perfect world, also increase our ability to get new games out to the market both faster and ideally better.”
“If we don’t embrace AI, we are going to be slower than what our competitors are”
She says the focus is on adding AI layers to existing tools for things like A/B testing, graphics, QA, and so on. AI solutions that have proven to be a success at individual studios within MTG are being embedded into the Plarium tech suite that’s rolling out across the company.
“We need to allow our different studios to try different things, as long as fits into our overarching AI framework on the dos and don’ts,” she says. “Then we share the learnings, and when one company’s developing something really good, we make sure we can very quickly roll that out on a broader scale.”
Given the fast-moving and highly competitive nature of the mobile market, we wonder whether it’s now impossible to compete without using AI in the game-creation process.
“I mean, it’s always dangerous to say that it is,” replies Redin. “I often get the question, is gaming AI going to be able to do everything you do? And I actually don’t think so. I think that what is important is that our talent, our workforce has an amazing creativity. That doesn’t sit yet within AI.
“However, I think if we don’t embrace AI, we are going to be slower than what our competitors are. And we want to make sure that we continue to run forward at a good pace, and I think that’s where AI can supercharge everything we do. We keep the creativity, innovation, and vision of our team, but we can actually leverage completely new levels of technology next to it.
“Before, it could be that you had a capacity shortfall, almost, and I think that’s where AI can significantly help us,” she says, giving analysis, coding, art, and advanced logic as examples. “So I think that AI is supercharging, and I think it is important to embrace it to make sure we can continue to do, at the core, amazing games.”
Growth opportunities
Redin says around 80% of MTG’s revenue currently comes from the Playamp division, and she is keen to expand the studio roster. “We bought Snowprint a couple years back, and if we could find five more Snowprints around the world, that would be fantastic. And on the casual side, we would like to add more scale.” Currently, the casual division consists of a single studio – Playsimple – yet still accounts for around 20% of MTG’s revenue.
“We have had our hands full in the buildup of Playamp and Playsimple and the potential IPO there,” Redin continues, “but over time, we would love to also see, is there a third district that we can add into our gaming village?” Exactly what form that potential third district would take is up in the air for now, but Redin says “it will be centred about the core capabilities that we have, so you would either leverage the marketing platforms or the data.”
In terms of games though, the future looks very much like the present in many ways. The mobile top ten rarely seems to change much these days. “Every year we do the same analysis, and you realise that the top games remain very consistent,” says Redin. “And our thesis has been from day one that we believe in evergreen IPs.”
The strategy, then, at least partly, is to invest in titles that are already successful. “I mean, Raid has so many more years ahead of it… But that doesn’t mean that we don’t believe in making new games, because you need to continue to have a pipeline of games coming to the market.”
“To not invest in new games, I think that would take away a little bit of the DNA of the different studios – that’s how you retain creativity, passion, and drive.”
That’s easier said than done, though. Supercell head Ilkka Paananen has warned that the western mobile industry is “coasting”, with only two of the 22 new mobile titles that have made over $1 billion since 2020 coming from the west. But Supercell itself has seen little success from new titles, despite investing heavily in game incubation programs: Squad Busters, for example, was shut down earlier this year after launching in 2024.
“It’s hard to make a successful game and scale a game,” acknowledges Redin, who says Plarium has a new title that’s set to soft launch early next year. “And I think we’ve all seen that across every single company out there. But to not invest in new games, I think that would take away a little bit of the DNA of the different studios. I think that is how you retain creativity, and that passion and drive.”
Looking at the bigger picture, against the backdrop of a maturing market, Redin sees new titles as a key to growth. “We’ve had hyper growth and then a decline back to stabilization and low levels of growth,” she says. “I mean, we do have three billion gamers out there, so is it a compelling market? Yes, it is a compelling market. Do we compete for airtime with streaming platforms, social media, and so forth? Yes, we do. But do I believe there’s still growth in the gaming market? Yes, I do.
“But I think we won’t see that hyper growth that we’ve seen. We see, depending on which data source you have, everything from low single digit to mid-single digit growth. And if you want to grow above and beyond that, you need to continue to invest in your strong evergreen IPs, but then you also need to be able to bring new games to the market.”