Nordic Startup News Early Stage Startup News From The Nordics
Tommy Palm, the man credited with creating one of the biggest mobile hits ever, Candy Crush Saga, leaves King.com to found new game studio Resolution Games together with other Swedish veterans.
At King, Palm’s title was ‘Game Guru’, and he was responsible for adapting the web version of Candy Crush into the worldwide mobile megahit, Candy Crush Saga, that beyond any doubt established King.com as one of the biggest players in the world of mobile games.
But in an interview with VentureBeat this afternoon, Tommy Palm reveals that he has left the casual powerhouse to start a new game studio, Resolution Games, together with other veterans from the Swedish games industry. The new studio is going to focus os Virtual Reality games, Palm tells VentureBeat.
The new studio will be Tommy Palm’s fifth new startup. Previously he has started a consultancy, Game Trail, Jadestone, and Fabrications Games. The latter was acquired by King.com in 2012, thus making him a King.com employee. And it is also the love of startups that he cites as the reason for his departure.
It was a hard decision to leave. King is a really fantastic company, the best company I have worked at. But I really like starting companies.
Joining Palm at the new studio is Martin Vilcans, previously of Dramatify, Vilcon, Goo Technologies, Wussap, Digital Legends Entertainment, Jadestone Group and Carl-Arvid Ewerbring who joins with experience from Bookl, EEA Consulting, and AnSa Protection. An unnamed fourth person is also said to be joining the studio shortly.
As well as joining the new studio, Palm will also be a part of the newly announced Swedish game incubator, Stugan, that we have covered previously here on Nordic Game Bits.
Candy Crush Saga was launched in 2012 and is still one of the best grossing games on the App Store with only Clash of Clans and War: Fire Age performing better. The performance of Candy Crush Saga was most likely also the major factor behind King.com’s ability to debut on the New York Stock Exchange at a value of around 6 billion dollars last year.
While King.com has had som succes with later games such as Farm Heroes Saga and Bubble Witch Saga 2, they have still not found a game to match Candy Crush Saga’s peak of 93M Daily Active Users in the spring of 2014.
