36,818 likes 384 talking about this. Huuuge Games is an international games developer and publisher, focused on the fast-growing multi-billion-dollar mobile gaming market. Huuuge Games came late to social casino games, launching its Huuuge Casino in late 2015. But the company has carved out a niche in the $4 billion global market. Anton Gauffin, CEO of the Palo Alto. 135,466 likes 124 talking about this. Huuuge Games official fan page!

1. Huuuge Games Facebook Play

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Social casino game maker Huuuge said it will go public in an initial public offering on the Warsaw Stock Exchange. The company expects to raise $150 million.

Though a latecomer in the segment, Huuuge found its niche in targeting younger players. It focuses on live operations — frequent updates such as tournaments to keep players coming back.

The company is taking advantage of a big window in gaming IPOs. Playtika went public at an $11.4 billion last week. If you talk about exit deals, or both acquisitions and IPOs, the total value hit $11.6 billion for 158 transactions, according to market analyst InvestGame. The biggest were Zynga’s acquisition of private Peak Games for $1.8 billion and Tencent’s acquisition of Leyou Technologies for $1.4 billion. Activision Blizzard raised $2 billion in senior notes (a form of debt).

Huuuge makes free-to-play social casino mobile games. It said it has 4.74 million monthly active users as off September 30, up from 3.98 million at the end of 2019. CEO Anton Gauffin started the company in 2015.

Huuuge has seen its revenues grow at a compound-annual-growth rate of 30.6% from $152.1 million in 2017 to $259.4 million at the end of 2019.

In the same period its consolidated adjusted EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization) increased from a loss of $4.3 million to $24.8 million.

For the nine months ended September 30, Huuuge generated consolidated revenue of $243.5 million compared to $187.3 million for the nine months ended September 30, 2019, reflecting a year-to-year growth of 30%. Last year, Huuuge had to pay $6.5 million to settle a class-action lawsuit accusing the company under Washington state law of violating gambling and consumer protection laws with its its free-to-play social casino games. Others in the industry have also had to pay to settle lawsuits in the state.

Above: Anton Gauffin, the CEO of Huuuge Games, at Casual Connect Europe in 2017.

In the same period Huuuge’s consolidated adjusted EBITDA increased to $54.2 million from $9.3 million. The company’s games include Huuuge Casino and Billionaire Casino. Huuuge operates through three main divisions, Mighty, Brave and HuuugeX. These divisions
manage Huuuge’s internal and external studios and its games.

Huuuge’s lineup includes social casino games such as Huuuge Casino, Billionaire Casino, Stars Slots, and Huuuge Bingo Saga. Its casual games under Coffee Break Games label include Traffic Puzzle, Transport it, Trolls Pop, and Luna’s Quest Bubble Shooter. Games in the early stages of development include Arena, Rogue Land, Arrows & Empires, and Solitaire TriPeaks: Adventure Journey.

In the IPO, a number of investors and the company will sell shares. Those selling include Big Bets OÜ (Anton Gauffin, founder and CEO), RPII HGE (an entity controlled by The Raine Group), Naver KIP Cheer up Gamers Fund, Korea Investment Global Contents Fund (funds managed by Korea Investment Partners), Seoul Investment Patent Venture Fund, Seoul IP Growth Industry Venture Fund (funds managed by Seoul Investment Partners), and Woori Technology Investment. Gauffin plans to retain a significant share of the company still.

Huuuge will use the money for acquisitions and investments, as well as ongoing operations. Gauffin currently holds 42% of the voting rights at the company. The company said it ranks among the top 10 companies in the multibillion-dollar social casino gaming market. The company has more than 600 employees in 10 offices.

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Huuuge Games came late to social casino games, launching its Huuuge Casino in late 2015. But the company has carved out a niche in the $4 billion global market.

Anton Gauffin, CEO of the Palo Alto, California-based company, said in an interview that the company will hit about $150 million revenues in 2017. That puts it at about No. 9 in the market, behind leaders such as Playtika, Scientific Games, Zynga, IGT, and Aristocrat. The latter just acquired Big Fish Games for $990 million from Churchill Downs, combining the No. 5 and No. 6 companies in the space.

That could put pressure on Huuuge, but Gauffin isn’t deterred. His company has grown to 300 employees, and it recently raised $50 million in funding. Huuuge has grown because it has tried to make the “most social” casino game, and it has targeted younger players with its advertising.

“Playtika and Scientific Games have been active on the M&A front,” Gauffin said. “But we were not interested in selling Huuuge. We felt that it was too early and we had a massive opportunity in front of us. We were far from done with our vision.”

Here’s an edited transcript of our conversation.

Above: Anton Gauffin, CEO of Huuuge Games, at Casual Connect Europe.

GamesBeat: You had your news about the $50 million raise. Could you explain that first, and talk about where you are as a company?

Anton Gauffin: We started working on the deal around the last GDC. We realized we had a good thing going on. Our plan was working, and it still is. We started thinking, “What next?” We felt it was early, and we had so much gas left in the tank that we would have plenty of opportunities to sell the company. Playtika and Scientific Games have been active on the M&A front. But we were not interested in selling Huuuge. We felt that it was too early and we had a massive opportunity in front of us. We were far from done with our vision. We ended up raising almost $50 million.

GamesBeat: Why does the company need that much money? Why do you need such a large team? You’re more than 300 people now.

Gauffin: The scale at which we operate has grown a lot. You can see that from AppAnnie. We’re doing more than $150 million in revenue this year, and we’re investing a lot in marketing. We did early stage/seed funding, and then we had A and B rounds. Before this round, though, we only raised $10 million all in all or so. We had all sorts of challenges because of that. We had to work with Facebook to get the credit lines up and deal with all those practical issues in scaling, because we didn’t have enough money in the bank. We needed more cash to increase our marketing scale. That’s a big part of the reason.

Second, we believe that in the long run, it’s all about bringing more product innovation to the market. Instead of being all in on Huuuge Casino, we’ve been actively building new games and doing our best to bring more innovation to the market. Part of the investment is going into new products that we were already working on. We wouldn’t have had sufficient marketing bandwidth to release those games when they become ready if we hadn’t raised the additional funding.

Above: Social casino games were a $1.16 billion market in the third quarter alone.

Huuuge Games Facebook Play

As far as team size, there are different approaches that different companies use to succeed in mobile gaming today. But in our case, at least—there’s the production team that builds the products and features for our games. We have a fairly large team powering that, doing business intelligence and all sorts of analysis regarding different experiments, from A/B tests to other things we do to continuously test. We’re very>12View All