Activision to buy Candy Crush dev for $5.9 billion

Activision Blizzard is set to splash the cash and purchase Candy Crush developer King Digital Entertainment for $5.9 billion.

The mobile game developer is apparently more lucrative than Star Wars; Disney paid $4 billion for Lucasfilm in 2012.

Activision should be on course to start seeing a return from its investment in a few years, assuming it can keep the mobile gaming public's attention. A CNN report last year stated that King "reported annual revenue of $1.9 billion and a profit of about $568 million."

King will operate as a subsidiary, so its current leadership line-up will stay the same. This was something that Activision's Bobby Kotick was keen to highlight. “Riccardo [Zacconi], Sebastian [Knutsson], and Stephane [Kurgan] are some of the best minds in the business,” he said before adding that Activision will provide King with "experience, support, and investment to continue to build on their tremendous legacy and reach new potential."

According to Kotick, the deal means that the combined group has a userbase of more than 500m monthly active users across almost 200 countries. This, he said, means that aside from YouTube or Facebook, "there isn’t a worldwide network that has a bigger number of audience members."

The boards of both companies and a majority of King's shareholders have already approved the deal. But 75% of votes cast by King investors at a meeting in Ireland is needed as well as the seal of approval from the Irish government for the deal to go through. Assuming they do so, King will be a part of the Activision Blizzard family by mid-2016.