Kabam shifts focus to mobile, sells off social games to RockYou

Free-to-play game company Kabam is abandoning social games in favor of the lucrative mobile market at the same time that RockYou is trying to buy up unwanted social games, so it's not so surprising that Kabam just sold the majority of its web games to RockYou for an undisclosed sum. The deal closes in 2015 and will see RockYou assuming control of Kabam's online games Kingdoms of Camelot, Dragons of Atlantis, Edgeworld, The Godfather and Glory of Rome. However, games originally developed by third parties and hosted on Kabam's website (including Realm of the Mad God) will not be included in the deal. "We are concentrating all of our development might and muscle on mobile games for our core North American and European markets, and expansion to Asia," Kabam COO Kent Wakeford stated in a press release confirming the sale. "At the same time, we want to provide an established home for Kabam's Web games to benefit the fans who have played them for years, and for new players whoall soon discover them on RockYou." This is an established play for RockYou, which took $10 million in funding from a financial startup in July to fuel its acquisition of moribund social and mobile games that it can integrate into its video advertising network. Around the same time, the increasingly mobile-minded Kabam (The Hobbit: Kingdoms of Middle Earth) made a deal with Alibaba that saw the Chinese firm investing $120 million into Kabam in return for a 10 percent stake in the company and the right to publish the developer's upcoming slate of licensed games on Alibaba's mobile game distribution platforms in China.