Small Giant Games is a

mobile game A mobile game, or smartphone game, is a video game that is typically played on a mobile phone. The term also refers to all games that are played on any portable device, including from mobile phone (feature phone or smartphone), tablet, PDA to ...

development company based in

Helsinki Helsinki ( or ; ; sv, Helsingfors, ) is the Capital city, capital, primate city, primate, and List of cities and towns in Finland, most populous city of Finland. Located on the shore of the Gulf of Finland, it is the seat of the region of U ...

Finland Finland ( fi, Suomi ; sv, Finland ), officially the Republic of Finland (; ), is a Nordic country in Northern Europe. It shares land borders with Sweden to the northwest, Norway to the north, and Russia to the east, with the Gulf of B ...

. It was founded in 2013 by former employees of mobile game maker Sulake. After producing two

casual game A casual game is a video game targeted at a mass market audience, as opposed to a hardcore game, which is targeted at hobbyist gamers. Casual games may exhibit any type of gameplay and genre. They generally involve simpler rules, shorter sessio ...

s, Small Giant found success with a

match-three A tile-matching video game is a type of puzzle video game where the player manipulates tiles in order to make them disappear according to a matching criterion. In many tile-matching games, that criterion is to place a given number of tiles of the ...

role-playing game A role-playing game (sometimes spelled roleplaying game, RPG) is a game in which players assume the roles of player character, characters in a fictional Setting (narrative), setting. Players take responsibility for acting out these roles within ...

entitled ''Empires and Puzzles''. After the success of ''Empires and Puzzles'', Small Giant was acquired by

Zynga Zynga Inc. () is an American developer running social video game services. It was founded in April 2007, with headquarters in San Mateo, California. The company primarily focuses on mobile and social networking platforms. Zynga states its missio ...

in December 2018.

Early ventures

Small Giant Games was founded in 2013 in

by a group of individuals laid off by mobile game developer Sulake. Otto Nieminen, formerly Sulake's product development officer, was the company's founding

chief executive officer A chief executive officer (CEO), also known as a central executive officer (CEO), chief administrator officer (CAO) or just chief executive (CE), is one of a number of corporate executives charged with the management of an organization especially ...

, with Timo Soininen, former CEO of Sulake, assuming the CEO role at Small Giant in 2014. Ex-Sulake chief technology officer Markus Halttunen joined Small Giant in the same position. Developers Ilkka Juopperi and Tommi Vallisto rounded out the Small Giant staff. By October 2013, Small Giant had raised $750,000 in seed money. Later that year, the company completed a fundraising campaign that generated USD 3.1 million to allow them to launch their first mobile game, ''OddWings Escape''. The game launched on May 14, 2015. In his review for

Pocket Gamer ''Pocket Gamer'' is a video game website that focuses on mobile, portable and handheld games. The site launched in 2005 and is published and owned by UK company Steel Media Ltd. The site covers all major portable and mobile gaming formats, incl ...

, Harry Slater described the game: "Oddwings Escape is a game about genetically modified mutant ducks flying through lovely looking backdrops. You have to collect hearts and coins, avoid bombs, and get as far as you can." OddWings Escape was downloaded over 1 million times in the week following its launch. The game's early success was credited, in part, to its having been translated into 15 different languages at launch, giving it broader international appeal. Small Giant's second game, ''Rope Racers'', involved racing through levels against ghost characters by swinging from a rope that could be projected from the player's character.

Empires and Puzzles

Following ''OddWings Escape'' and ''Rope Racers'', Soininen described a change in Small Giant's focus away from

s: "we decided to kill those products pretty quickly and start looking for the big one. How could we really get that top-50 grossing game? What does it take?"

EQT Ventures EQT Ventures is the venture capital business of Sweden, Swedish Investment management, investment manager EQT Partners, EQT AB Group. In May 2016, EQT Ventures announced its first €566m fund that makes minority equity investments in European an ...

provided Small Giant with EUR 5.4 million in

venture capital Venture capital (often abbreviated as VC) is a form of private equity financing that is provided by venture capital firms or funds to startups, early-stage, and emerging companies that have been deemed to have high growth potential or which ha ...

in 2017 for marketing and game development. In March 2017, Small Giant launched, ''Empires and Puzzles'', a

puzzle game that also incorporates elements of

s. By the end of the year, Small Giant reported that ''Empires and Puzzles'' had generated USD 33 million in revenue. The game won the Game of the Year award at the 2017 Finnish Game Awards in 2017. EQT Ventures invested an additional USD 41 million in Small Giant Games in January 2018 to assist with scaling the game to a larger audience. Only four months into the year, ''Empires and Puzzles'' exceeded its revenue generation for 2017. By the end of 2018, it had been downloaded 26 million times from the

Google Play Store Google Play, also known as the Google Play Store and formerly the Android Market, is a digital distribution service operated and developed by Google. It serves as the official app store for certified devices running on the Android operating sys ...

and

Apple App Store The App Store is an app store platform, developed and maintained by Apple Inc., for mobile apps on its iOS and iPadOS operating systems. The store allows users to browse and download approved apps developed within Apple's iOS Software Devel ...

. ''Empires and Puzzles'' won the award for "Best Breakthrough Hit" in the 2018 Google Play Awards; Small Giant was a nominee for Best Live Ops and Best Developer at the Pocket Gamer Mobile Games Awards in 2019.

Acquisition by Zynga

In December 2018,

announced that it had reached an agreement to purchase Small Giant Games. Zynga purchased 80% of the company initially for USD 330 million in cash and USD 230 million in Zynga unregistered common stock. The terms for purchasing the remaining portion of the company will be set based on its performance over the three years following the initial acquisition. Empires and Puzzles continued to perform well for Small Giant and Zynga. In October 2019, the game reached USD 500 million in lifetime revenue and reached 41 million downloads. In May 2020, Zynga paid the first of three installments for the remaining 20 percent of the company, transferring $122 million to Small Giant after Zynga posted $404 million in revenue for the first quarter of 2020, a 52% increase. Small Giant

soft launch A soft launch, also known as a soft opening, is a preview release of a product or service to a limited audience prior to the general public. Soft-launching a product is sometimes used to gather data or customer feedback, prior to making it widely ...

ed its next game, ''Puzzle Combat'', on March 8, 2019. The game shares many gameplay elements with ''Empires and Puzzles'', but it features a modern warfare setting.

References

{{Take-Two Interactive Video game companies established in 2013 Zynga Companies based in Helsinki Video game companies of Finland Mobile game companies Finnish companies established in 2013 2018 mergers and acquisitions