The cofounder of King, the startup behind the blockbuster mobile game Candy Crush that sold to Activision Blizzard in 2016 for $5.9 billion, has formed a new stealth gaming startup.
After selling Candy Crush developer King for $5.9 Billion to Activision, one of its cofounders Sebastian Knutsson has a new gaming startup.
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Corporate filings in Ireland and Sweden show that Sebastian Knutsson, cofounder and former chief creative officer, and Stephane Kurgan, former King COO, registered a new business called Queen Digital Entertainment (QDE) in 2023. LinkedIn updates show that the pair have hired at least 10 former King staffers to work on the new gaming project. Former King vice president Anna Lernmark was hired in August 2023 to head up the new gaming studio’s Stockholm-based office.
The team are working on new casual gaming apps with early plans focused on a ‘match 3’-style puzzle game, where players line up matching sets of icons to form a scoring line, sources close to QDE told Forbes. Similar games like Candy Crush or Royal Match (developed by Turkish startup Dream Games), have dominated the charts of most downloaded apps for over a decade.
Queen raised around $5 million from Knutsson, Kurgan, and another King cofounder Thomas Hartwig, and Kurt Bjorklund, managing director with private equity giant Permira, according to sources and corporate filings. Knutsson, Kurgan and QDE declined to comment.
The name of the new gaming startup is a wink to former colleagues at King, which was an early champion of so-called “freemium” casual gaming. Its hit game Candy Crush Saga generated $20 billion in revenue since its launch in 2012, and attracted over 5 billion downloads, according to King. Dream Games’ Royal Match app overtook Candy Crush as the top grossing app in July 2023 just 18 months after the Istanbul-based startup raised $255 million at a $2.75 billion valuation in January 2022.
American studio Scopley’s Monopoly Go game has since surpassed both titles with the help of hundreds of millions of dollars in marketing. That comes as the gaming industry faces its biggest slowdown in decades with researchers Newzoo estimating that the global games market grew by only 0.5% to $183.9 billion in annual revenue last year.
“Match 3 games are a very saturated space where it will be tough to stand out,” says Anna Kerr, games analyst with Ampere Analysis. “You will be paying a lot to enter that space.”
Activision Blizzard bought King just over three years after the launch of Candy Crush and 18 months after the Swedish game developer had listed on the New York Stock Exchange (Activision Blizzard was then bought by Microsoft for $69 billion in 2022). At the time, the deal was a landmark one within gaming, and one of the largest takeovers for European tech companies.
Knutsson stepped back from working as King’s chief creative officer in March 2022 to focus on Sweet Capital, a venture capital fund he set up with King cofounders Riccardo Zacconi and Thomas Hartwig. Kurgan left King in 2019 and has since been a venture partner at Index Ventures.
This article was originally published on forbes.com.
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