In February of the previous year, Swedish mobile powerhouse Modern Times Group (MTG) completed a $620 million purchase of Plarium, the studio behind the blockbuster hero‑collection title Raid: Shadow Legends. According to Maria Redin, MTG’s president and chief executive, that deal was merely the opening move in a much larger plan. "Last year we set a vision that, following the Plarium acquisition, we want to double our size once again," Redin told GamesIndustry.biz.
"We intend to keep driving organic growth, but to reach that target we’ll need to make additional acquisitions." The timeline she proposes is bold: MTG aims to achieve the doubling within roughly three to five years. Redin points out that the company has already demonstrated an ability to scale quickly – in 2021 the firm set a similar ambition and ended up tripling its size. A few years ago the mobile market was expanding at double‑digit rates, but growth has now slowed to single‑digit percentages, reflecting a maturing ecosystem.
What was once an open blue ocean has become a fiercely contested red sea, where gaining market share often means swallowing competitors whole. While buying studios is relatively straightforward, integrating them successfully is notoriously difficult, and the industry is littered with examples of failed mergers that resulted in studio closures.
MTG believes it has a roadmap to avoid those pitfalls. Before the Plarium deal, MTG already owned a portfolio of mobile developers, including InnoGames (Forge of Empires), Snowprint (Warhammer 40,000: Tacticus), Hutch (F1 Clash), Ninja Kiwi (Bloons TD 6), and Futureplay (Merge Gardens). These studios were grouped into two “districts”: a Casual District and a Midcore District – the latter covering games that sit between pure casual and hardcore experiences.
The districts have now been rebranded as Playsimple and Playamp. Playsimple, named after the India‑based WordTrip studio, houses free‑to‑play, ad‑supported titles, while Playamp contains the in‑app‑purchase‑driven games that make up the bulk of MTG’s revenue. Redin says the rebranding is only the tip of the iceberg. Her goal is to build “one of the leading gaming villages,” a phrase chosen deliberately to convey a sense of community that employees want to belong to.
Retaining talent and fostering a cohesive culture are critical when a company is rapidly absorbing new studios. "Gaming is the perfect marriage of creativity and data‑driven decision‑making," she notes.
"People are our biggest asset, but we must also create an environment where they can thrive. When we acquire a studio, we want the founders and their teams to stay on board, because that’s when the real story begins and the business can scale further.
The only way to ensure they stay is to make the workplace enjoyable." A parallel effort underway since Redin became CEO in 2020 is the standardisation of technology and tools across the group. The Plarium acquisition gave MTG the scale needed to roll out this vision fully. Redin acknowledges that tech standardisation can be risky – citing EA’s problematic push to force all studios onto the Frostbite engine – but stresses that the needs of Playsimple and Playamp differ dramatically, so the two divisions are being equipped with separate tech stacks. "Playsimple’s stack will become the foundation for any future casual studio we bring in," she explains.
"For Midcore, we have selected parts of Plarium’s tech suite to share group‑wide, but we are deploying it selectively to ensure the end result benefits every studio. We performed a thorough internal assessment to decide where collaboration makes sense and where it does not." Plarium’s GoGame marketing platform and product‑detail‑page data system are already being used across MTG, and Redin says the group is adding new features to enhance them. The aim is to maximise impact: "We want to focus our efforts where we get the biggest bang for our buck. We have fantastic game makers across the group, and with Playamp we intend to super‑charge them with a tech suite that elevates everything they already do." Generative AI is another pillar of MTG’s strategy.
InnoGames, for example, has been generating all content for its mobile title Sunrise Village with AI for some time and plans to expand that capability across its catalogue. Redin observes that AI integration is becoming a common discussion point throughout the mobile sector.
"Generative AI is far more powerful than any tool we’ve had before," she says, noting that studios are experimenting with AI for A/B testing, graphics creation, quality assurance, and more. Successful AI solutions from individual studios are being folded into the Plarium tech suite for broader use. When asked whether AI will eventually replace human designers, Redin is cautious.
"I don’t think AI will do everything we do. The creativity of our people is still essential and not yet replicable by machines.
However, if we ignore AI we risk falling behind competitors. AI can accelerate our workflows, fill capacity gaps, and help us bring games to market faster and at higher quality." Financially, about 80 % of MTG’s revenue now comes from the Playamp division, with the remaining 20 % generated by Playsimple.
Redin is eager to broaden both sides. "We acquired Snowprint a few years ago; finding five more studios like Snowprint worldwide would be fantastic. On the casual side, we’d like to add scale as well," she says. Currently Playsimple is a single studio, but Redin hints at the possibility of creating a third district in the future, one that would leverage the group’s core marketing and data capabilities.
Regarding the game pipeline, Redin stresses that the mobile top‑ten remains remarkably stable year after year. "Our thesis from day one has been to back evergreen IPs," she explains.
While Raid Shadow Legends still has many years of life ahead, MTG also recognises the need for fresh titles to keep the creative engine humming. Plarium is preparing a new game for a soft launch early next year, and Redin acknowledges the difficulty of launching successful new titles in a market where only a handful of recent releases have broken the $1 billion barrier. Despite the market’s maturity, Redin remains optimistic about growth. With roughly three billion gamers worldwide, the sector is still compelling, even as it competes for attention with streaming services and social media.
She predicts that hyper‑growth will be unlikely, with annual expansion likely to hover in the low‑ to mid‑single‑digit range. To exceed that baseline, MTG will need to continue investing in strong evergreen franchises while also nurturing new games that can capture fresh audiences.