Candy Crush Creators Are Among the Richest People in Britain

[Cognimancer]

Candy Crush Creators Are Among the Richest People in Britain

Candy Crush Saga's creators, as it turns out, have an awful lot of money.

Candy Crush Saga developer King hasn't had a great time on the stock market [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/133280-King-Faces-Worst-First-Day-in-US-Trading-History-Stock-Drops-15], but the studio's Wall Street woes don't seem to have impacted its executives very much. The Sunday Times has released its 2014 Rich List, compiling the top 1,000 wealthiest people in Britain, and a few big names from the games industry have made the cut. This includes two of King's founders, who are notably ranked far above some industry titans like the creators of Grand Theft Auto.

Riccardo Zacconi and Sebastian Knutsson, two co-founders of King, are ranked at positions 271 and 458 on the list with net worths of £354 million and £200 million, respectively. King COO Stephane Kurgan is worth £85 million at rank 989, and Derbyshire businessman Mel Morris (who holds a 12 percent stake in King) is the wealthiest games-related person on the list with £430 million at the number 238 spot. I'm no mathematician, but that adds up to a lot of candy.

Meanwhile, Rockstar's Sam and Dan Houser barely made the list with a combined worth of £90 million, sharing the 947 spot. The Houser brothers helped co-found Rockstar Games in 1998, and are currently the President and VP of the company. This is the first year they've made the Rich list, no doubt because of the massive success of Grand Theft Auto V [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/127931-Grand-Theft-Auto-V-Sells-800-Million-On-Launch-Day].

Also on the list are GAME founder Neil Taylor with £220 million, and Runescape creators Andrew and Paul Gower with £102 million.

Source: IGN [http://www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/Magazine/article1409914.ece]

Permalink

 

[Atmos Duality]

No surprise there.
The ruthless and tend to pull ahead in today's cutthroat business world.

 

[dumbseizure]

With how much money my grandparents sink into Candy Crush, I think that alone could fuel the company for a few years....

 

[shirkbot]

Candy Crush Saga developer King hasn't had a great time on the stock market [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/133280-King-Faces-Worst-First-Day-in-US-Trading-History-Stock-Drops-15], but the studio's Wall Street woes don't seem to have impacted its executives very much.

This sums up one of the major problems with pretty much every business involved in the stock market. The executives are always the last to go.

OT: Congratulations guys, you have amassed enough money to comfortably live out several human lifetimes. Maybe now you can consider not abusing the trademark system...

 

[Therumancer]

Candy Crush Saga developer King hasn't had a great time on the stock market [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/133280-King-Faces-Worst-First-Day-in-US-Trading-History-Stock-Drops-15], but the studio's Wall Street woes don't seem to have impacted its executives very much.

This sums up one of the major problems with pretty much every business involved in the stock market. The executives are always the last to go.

OT: Congratulations guys, you have amassed enough money to comfortably live out several human lifetimes. Maybe now you can consider not abusing the trademark system...

No, the whole problem is there is no safeguard present when people get that rich that prevents them from simply using that money to try and make more money.

See, I'm a big believer in capitalism, but I feel that one of the problems with the first world is when you wind up with a few greedy bastards/corporations that ruin it for everyone else. Of course the real trick is how to prevent this without basically creating a socialist state. Such thoughts are why I constantly talk about being more to the right than the left, but overall being somewhere in the middle as I do have my leftist attitudes.

The ones I always pick on are guys like "Citigroup" (Citibank, etc...), or Sony which is pretty much the poster child for an evil corporation (indeed they were what a lot of the Cyberpunk evil 'Japanacorps' were based on) as well as sort of making the point that this article does, that public stocks and released data don't always tell the entire story. One of the big things with Sony going back to the 1980s is that it's a spider-web, they present themselves as being relatively humble on the corporate side of things, but literally have so many businesses and interests which they intentionally hide it's difficult to tell when your actually dealing with them. That's why I laugh when I hear about people talking about Sony being "in trouble" nobody can really gauge that because nobody has been able to get far enough into their business dealings to tell how big they really are.

Not something that I'm going to debate here seriously, but the point is that it doesn't shock me that despite seeming relatively humble on paper, the guys behind King are actually crazy rich. Of course at the same time that's simply because your looking at their personal fortunes compare to the company. In other cases you need to look at the opposite, consider say "Rockstar" where they finance some of the most expensive games out there, where their presidents have a combine worth of a "mere" 90 million they probably have a lot more tied up in their company and other investments. Honestly when I see someone on a list with hundreds of millions of dollars in personal assets when they are running a business it usually makes me think they aren't too bright because most people with that kind of money want to keep as much of it sheltered or tied up in investments and such to hide it from public record, for both business and legal reasons. The only reason I can think for them to have all of this money personally if they aren't dumb, is that they are expecting their company to go down, and want to minimize how much they can lose, having set things up where the company is treated as a separate entity, only able to be made accountable with it's own assets and not the personal fortunes of the people running it.

 

[MCerberus]

You would have thought that at some point, at some level, 2008 would have shown that requiring short-term profitability above all else is a recipe for disaster. Not only does it lead to the inflated bonus market for execs, but it takes good ideas and then lets them hang until it gets to the "wow we really should have put more investment back into the company, oh well" point. In the case of the casual game market, it pretty much always ends with the execs and pre-public investors making a mint while completely screwing over the common stocks and employees.

 

[Staskala]

Candy Crush Saga developer King hasn't had a great time on the stock market [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/133280-King-Faces-Worst-First-Day-in-US-Trading-History-Stock-Drops-15], but the studio's Wall Street woes don't seem to have impacted its executives very much.

Why should it affect the founders in any way? They got their money when they went to the stock market, whatever happens to the stock now is of no concern to them.

 

[TerribleAssassin]

My surprise when the company based upon tricking people into paying money make a lot of it.

Shock

 

[BarkBarker]

Satan pays well his minons.

 

[Vegosiux]

King.com already has all the hallmarks of a stock-market dud within what is already shaping up to be the new tech bubble. The fact that their executives are willing and able to take so much personal wealth when much of the companies value is on paper leads me to think they aren't doing the wise thing and stashing all the capital they can for when things inevitably start to get more barren. Rockstar probably has enough capital to keep it going for 5+ years if they decide to develop a game for that long.

But dude, they need that wealth to create new jobs! How are they going to create new jobs if they don't have that wealth? They're already halfway to creating new jobs, they already have this "hoarding wealth" part down, all they need to do is move on to the "actually creating jobs" part!

Casual 'game' makers like this rise and fall all the time. I can pretty much lay out their future for them;
-They will struggle to find that next big hit and so will end up buying a bunch of other companies in order to try and take their potential hits.
-Investors will start to worry about falling profits and raising capital will become a problem, a problem they are not used to.
-The large number of Employees with not be supportable and they will end up having to sell many of these new acquisitions as well as lay off some of their own staff.
-Many who invested in the IPO and shareholders will see their stock as worthless and begin to question how the company miss-handled. This could lead to investors filing legal complaints.
-King.com will continue on a slow decline losing users and revenue. Look at Zynga. Their stock is trading at 1/3 of it's initial offering and that's in a very inflated market.

Yea it's almost as if this kind of thing happened before...