Putting a classic game in a new guise and bring via apps stores on the smartphones and tablets of millions of consumers. This was the founding of the Grazer Spielestudio Supertreat founded by the founders Christian Baumgartner, Christian Zehetner, Andreas Oberdorfer and Andreas Schörkhuber in 2016. On the Google Play Store alone, the game “Solitaire – Grand Harvest” (in the German-speaking world as “Solitaire – Golden Harvest” on the market) was downloaded more than a million times.
Bidding for the Grazer
Now Supertreat, which was until the very end in the possession of the founders, has announced an apparently spectacular takeover by the Israeli gaming company Playtika. The takeover amount and further details were agreed to remain silent. In any case, the total volume of the deal Supertreat according to move is in the range of the previous large Austrian deals.
About two companies came to make a bid for the game when it appeared in the US game hit parades. “We had about ten prospects. After a general screening and a short bidding war between an American company and Playtika. Playtika then won, “says co-founder Christian Baumgartner to Trending Topics.
“Overall, the whole took about nine months. We believe that with Playtika, Grand Harvest will reach its full potential and become one of the major brands in the app market. That would have been extremely difficult to accomplish with twelve people from Austria,” he added.
Free-to-play and in-app purchases
Playtika soon after specializing in so-called “free-to-play” games after its founding in 2010, has grown rapidly through acquisitions of other games such as Bingo Blitz or Jelly Button. In 2016, the company was bought by a Chinese consortium, which includes Alibaba founder Jack Ma, the previous owner Caesars Interactive Entertainment by a whopping $ 4.4 billion. Playtika claims to own 27 million users and approximately 2,000 employees worldwide.
The game, with which Supertreat aroused the interest of buyers, made it in 2018 as the only Austrian game in the top 100 of the “best earner” iOS app charts in the United States. According to the analysis service SensorTower “Solitaire – Grand Harvest” alone in December 2018 through the Apple and Google app stores have made about 400,000 downloads and two million dollars in sales.
The solitaire version of Supertreat works according to the freemium model established in mobile games. The basic version is free, players can buy extra coins via in-app purchases. You pay between $ 2 and $ 150 per purchase to get faster in the game.
Also published on Medium.