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Goodgame joins Stillfront Group in €270m deal

German free-to-play studio will add Goodgame Empire and Big Farm to Stillfront's growing portfolio

Goodgame Studios has been acquired by the Stillfront Group in a deal worth €270 million.

Altigi, the ownership group behind the Hamburg-based Goodgame Studios, will receive €231 million of that amount in the form of 16.86 million newly issued Stillfront shares. The remaining €39 million will be paid to the owners in cash.

For the first nine months of 2017, Stillfront earned €11.3 million in revenue, while Goodgame earned €71.1 million over the same period. In 2018, the group is expected to earn between €120 million and €130 million in revenue in revenue, and €25 million and €30 million in pre-tax earnings.

"Goodgame Studios and Stillfront are a perfect strategic fit, forming a true European gaming champion with compelling complementary game portfolios and operational synergies," said Stillfront CEO Jörgen Larsson in a statement.

It will be proposed to Stillfront's directors that Dr. Christian Wawrzinek, Goodgame's founder and CSO, should join the board. Goodgame CEO Kai Wawrzinek described the deal as "a consequent step towards our long-term vision of creating one of the world's leading gaming companies."

Stillfront owns "semi-autonomous" game studios in Sweden, Germany, Malta, the US, the UAE, Jordan and Romania, including Unravel developer Coldwood. The group's portfolio comprises 15 core games, most of which are free-to-play strategy games for mobile and browser - including Call of War, Siege: Titan Wars and World at War.

Goodgame has two successful IPs, Goodgame Empire and Big Farm, the former of which recently surpassed $800 million in lifetime revenue.

However, the German studio's path to this point hasn't been entirely free from issues. Goodgame expected to reach 1600 people before the end of 2015, but hundreds of jobs were cut across several rounds of redundancies, finishing in January this year.

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Matthew Handrahan

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Matthew Handrahan joined GamesIndustry in 2011, bringing long-form feature-writing experience to the team as well as a deep understanding of the video game development business. He previously spent more than five years at award-winning magazine gamesTM.