In February of last 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. That deal, however, is only the opening move in what MTG’s president and chief executive, Maria Redin, describes as an aggressive expansion plan. Redin told GamesIndustry.biz that the company’s vision, set after the Plarium acquisition, is to double its size once more.
“We set out the vision last year that post‑acquisition of Plarium we want to double yet again in size,” she said. “And yes, we want to fuel and continue to drive organic growth, but in order to do that, we will need to do more acquisitions.” The timeline is bold: Redin aims to achieve the doubling within roughly three to five years.
She notes that MTG has already demonstrated the capacity to scale quickly, having tripled its size after a similar ambition was announced in 2021. The mobile gaming landscape has shifted dramatically in recent years. While the sector once enjoyed double‑digit growth, it now averages single‑digit increases as the market matures.
What was once a blue‑ocean of untapped opportunity has turned into a crowded, competitive arena where growth often means taking market share from rivals—or absorbing them outright. Acquiring companies is the easier half of the equation; integrating them is notoriously hard.
The industry is littered with cautionary tales of failed mergers that led to studio closures. MTG, however, believes it has a clear roadmap for integration. Before buying Plarium, MTG already owned several mobile studios, 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 recently been rebranded as Playsimple and Playamp. Playsimple, named after the India‑based WordTrip studio, houses free‑to‑play, ad‑supported titles, while Playamp focuses on games that generate revenue primarily through in‑app purchases.
Redin says the rebranding is more than cosmetic; it reflects a broader ambition to create “one of the leading gaming villages.” The term “village” is intentional, meant to foster a sense of community that encourages employee retention and smooth integration of newly acquired teams. “People are for sure one of our biggest assets,” she explained. “We buy our companies, which also means that we want the founders and the teams to stay on board post‑acquisition, because that’s when the true exciting story should start and you continue to scale the businesses.” A key pillar of the integration strategy is the standardisation of technology and tools across the group. Redin has pursued this goal since becoming CEO in 2020, but the Plarium deal gave MTG the scale needed to roll it out fully.
She acknowledges the risks—citing EA’s troubled Frostbite rollout—as a reminder that a one‑size‑fits‑all approach can backfire. Consequently, MTG tailors its tech stacks: Playsimple receives a foundation that will serve future casual acquisitions, while Playamp adopts select components of Plarium’s suite, deployed selectively after a thorough internal assessment of where sharing makes sense. Plarium’s GoGame marketing platform and product‑detail‑page data system are already being used across MTG, with additional features being added to enhance their utility.
Redin emphasises that the goal is to maximise impact: “We want to make sure that we put our efforts where we get the biggest bang for our buck. We have some amazing game makers across the group, and what we want to do now with Playamp is to really supercharge that with a tech suite that they can leverage on.” Artificial intelligence is another accelerant. InnoGames, for example, has been generating content for its mobile title Sunrise Village with AI for some time and is exploring broader AI‑driven content creation.
Redin sees this as part of a wider industry trend: “Generative AI is significantly more powerful than any other tool that we got access to before. We are all trying to find our ways of how to strike the right balance for it… to make our games more relevant for the players and, ideally, get new games to market faster and better.” MTG’s AI strategy focuses on augmenting existing pipelines—A/B testing, graphics, quality assurance, and more—rather than replacing human creativity. Successful AI solutions from individual studios are being folded into the Plarium tech suite and shared across the organisation, provided they fit within the company’s overarching AI framework. When asked whether AI could eventually replace game developers, Redin cautioned against such deterministic thinking.
“I often get the question, is gaming AI going to be able to do everything you do? I actually don’t think so. What is important is that our talent has amazing creativity, and that doesn’t sit yet within AI.” Nevertheless, she warns that ignoring AI would leave MTG lagging behind competitors, noting that AI can help bridge capacity shortfalls in coding, art, and complex logic.
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 of the portfolio.
She mentions Snowprint as a model: “If we could find five more Snowprints around the world, that would be fantastic.” On the casual front, she envisions adding more studios to Playsimple and eventually creating a third “district” that would leverage the group’s core marketing and data capabilities. Despite the market’s maturity, Redin believes evergreen IPs remain central to MTG’s strategy. “Every year we do the same analysis, and you realise that the top games remain very consistent,” she observed, noting that titles like Raid have many years of revenue potential ahead.
At the same time, she stresses the necessity of a fresh pipeline: “It would take away a little bit of the DNA of the different studios if we didn’t invest in new games. That is how you retain creativity, passion, and drive.” The broader industry context is sobering. Western mobile developers have struggled to produce new billion‑dollar hits, with only two out of 22 such titles since 2020 originating from the West. Supercell’s own incubation efforts have yielded mixed results, exemplified by the recent shutdown of Squad Busters.
Redin concludes on an optimistic note about the market’s size and potential. With roughly three billion gamers worldwide, she affirms that the market is still compelling, even if hyper‑growth is unlikely. “We see low‑single‑digit to mid‑single‑digit growth depending on the data source.
If you want to grow above and beyond that, you need to continue to invest in your strong evergreen IPs, but you also need to be able to bring new games to the market.”