Mobile gaming company Kabam doubles 2013 revenue to $360M, is “seriously considering” IPO
Social Game Maker Kabam Continues Growth — Mobile videogame maker Kabam said it tallied more than $360 million in gross revenue in 2013, doubling results from the prior year …
Context & Ripple Effects
Three years ago Kabam was a mid-size social gaming startup raising $30M on an explicitly anti-Zynga strategy, positioning itself against Zynga's Facebook-centric model rather than competing head-on. The 2013 results reported today — more than $360M in gross revenue, double the prior year — are the payoff of that bet: the company grew by moving off the social network and onto mobile.
The disclosure travelled unusually widely for a private company's unaudited numbers, picked up the same day by TechCrunch, GamesIndustry International, and Develop Feed, which suggests both press and peers are treating Kabam as a bellwether for whether mobile-only game studios can sustain hypergrowth. The IPO talk is unconfirmed — the company says it is 'seriously considering' a listing, not that one is filed.
First-order effects
- Kabam's revenue doubling validates its 2011 anti-Zynga pivot, putting the company in a position where an IPO becomes a financing option rather than a necessity, since growth at this rate can still be funded privately.
Second-order effects
- Zyga's social-first playbook now looks structurally disadvantaged against mobile-native studios like Kabam, forcing every funded social games company to justify why its audience sits on Facebook rather than on phones.
Third-order effects
- If Kabam's trajectory holds, mobile gaming becomes the first post-social segment of casual gaming where venture-backed studios reach public-company scale without ever building a business on the Facebook platform, resetting what investors expect from the category.
The trend: Mobile game studios are scaling fast enough to graduate from venture funding toward public listings, decoupling the casual games business from the social networks that seeded it.