MMM: Savvy Games Group Purchase Scopely for $4.9B

Key Takeaways:

• Savvy Games Group, a gaming company owned by Saudi Arabia’s public investment fund, agreed to purchase mobile game developer/publisher Scopely for $4.9bn. This acquisition will be the sixth largest gaming acquisition of all time

  • Scopely ranked as the 23rd highest grossing mobile game publisher worldwide in 2022, with over $900mn in gross app-store bookings (per ST data)

  • About half of its in-app bookings came from its top two titles, Star Trek Fleet Command and MARVEL Strike Force ($215mn, $230mn in ‘22 bookings, respectively)

  • This acquisition gives Savvy more exposure to the US market: ~75% of Scopely’s app-store bookings are from the US

• Spotify recently announced that it would sunset Spotify Live, a standalone social/audio app that allowed creators and listeners to interact with live conversation. The music streaming giant said it will explore adding live audio features in its main Spotify platform in the future. ST data indicates that Spotify Live has ~670k all-time worldwide installs

  • Live audio apps first gained traction during the pandemic but have since fallen out of consumer interest as lockdown restrictions lifted and consumer tastes adjusted. Most notably, Clubhouse experienced a meteoric rise in adoption upon its broader release in fall 2020, garnering 35mn worldwide downloads in 2021. However that rise was short-lived as downloads fell 83% YoY in 2022, and MAUs as of Mar’23 are down 82% from its Jun’21 high

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