Dutch social gaming outfit GamePoint has acquired Israeli social casino developer Luck Genome.
On Tuesday, GamePoint – the Hague-based firm behind a variety of multiplayer online bingo, card and casino games – announced a deal to acquire Tel Aviv-based software firm Luck Genome, the two-year-old outfit behind the Slots Craze mobile and Facebook platform, which features over 60 social casino titles.
GamePoint CEO Amon Endt said the acquisition marked “a major step forward in our growth ambitions in social casino games.” Luck Genome’s games have been downloaded over 4m times, with the bulk of its customers residing in North America and Australia.
The deal will see Luck Genome retain its name while its 10 employees – including founders Guy Ezra and Liat Adir (CEO and head of product, respectively) – will remain hard at work at the company’s development center in Tel Aviv. Luck Genome plans to double its workforce over the coming year, with most of the additions expected in product and marketing positions.
Luck Genome was founded out of the ashes of Win Interactive, the former social gaming arm of Bwin.party digital entertainment, who decided to get out of the free-play business in 2015. Ezra and Adir, who’d worked at Win for about a year, opted to buy the Win assets and branch out on their own.
The deal, which is reportedly worth $12.5m, in a minnow compared to this month’s $825m sale of IGT’s DoubleDown Interactive to South Korea’s DoubleU Games or last summer’s $4.4b sale of Caesars Interactive’s Playtika social gaming division to a Chinese consortium.
Luck Genome’s Ezra agreed that the social casino market was “ruled by the large companies in the field, and in order to cope with them, resources are needed for small companies” like his. Teaming with GamePoint, “a significant player in this field, is expected to help us in our global expansion efforts and the realization of our potential.”
In other social casino news, PlayStudios has just released a redesigned version of its popular myVegas Slots app. PlayStudios CEO Andrew Pascal says his team has been “working tirelessly for months” on the new app, which he called “the most significant product update we’ve ever shipped.”
