Transition to social gaming Īround 2009, social network games on Facebook began to gain popularity, led primarily through games developed by Zynga. Angel investor and former board member Klaus Hommels sold his similar stake at the same time. Rowland departed the company in 2008 to found Mangahigh, a web portal aimed for educational math games, and sold his stake back to the company for $3 million in 2011.

By 2009, the company was making about $60 million annually. continued to develop games for its web portal, which it would also share to other web portals like Yahoo! Overall, King had developed about 200 games for their portal.

This investment was the last one that the company received before its initial public offering in 2014. During this year, the company raised $43 million by selling a large stake to Apax Partners and Index Ventures. By 2005, the company had been able to turn a profit. Initially, was not profitable, and nearly went bankrupt until a cash infusion from Morris on Christmas Eve of 2003 helped to finance the company.

The site,, was then launched in August of that year. The company was initially based out of Stockholm, Sweden, and started with the development of browser-based video games. Zacconi and Rowland joined with Thomas Hartwig, Sebastian Knutsson, Lars Markgren and Patrik Stymne, all of whom had worked previously with Zacconi at the failed dot-com web portal Spray, to create a new company with angel investment provided by Morris, who became the company's chairman. Morris opted to sell the site to the leading dating website (a subsidiary of IAC) for $150 million in 2003. Prior to founding King, Riccardo Zacconi and Toby Rowland, the latter of whom is the only son of British businessman Tiny Rowland, had worked together on, a dating website created by Melvyn Morris which, by 2003, was the second-largest such site in the world. Gerhard Florin took over Melvyn Morris's role as chairman in November 2014. King is led by Riccardo Zacconi, who has served in the role of chief executive officer since co-founding the company in 2003. King was acquired by Activision Blizzard in February 2016 for US$5.9 billion, and operates as its own entity within that company. King gained prominence after releasing the cross-platform title Candy Crush Saga in 2012, considered one of the most financially successful games utilising the freemium model. Julian's, Malta that specialises in social games. Limited, trading as King and also known as King Digital Entertainment, is a Maltese video game developer and publisher based in St.

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