Mobile game dev Voodoo has acquired the similarly focused studio Gumbug for an undisclosed sum to support the rapid development of Voodoo’s hypercasual mobile games.
In a chat with VentureBeat, Voodoo CEO Alexandre Yazdi explained that the acquisition might allow the studio to expand from 15 employees to around 20 or 25, though Voodoo typically shies away from growing teams too large.
Yazdi also offers a bit of a breakdown of how Voodoo rapidly iterates and catapults its mobile games to the top of app store charts in the full VentureBeat interview.
“What we do is try to assess as fast as possible the potential of the game. So after a few weeks or months of development, we just launch the game on the app store, and we look at the retention metrics in order to see whether the users really love the game,” Yazdi tells VentureBeat. “And if not, we just try to kill the game very fast. So that enables us to focus a lot of time and energy […] in high potential games.”
He notes that Voodoo’s 100 plus published titles boast over 300 million in monthly active users, and has accumulated over 1 billion player and 2.6 billion total downloads since 2013.
As a part of Voodoo, Gumbug, the developer of titles like Smash Supreme, will now be tasked with bolstering live operations for Voodoo titles, as well as contribute to optimization and design for its hypercasual mobile games. The acquisition comes just under a month after Voodoo opened its own new studio in Montreal with the goal of dabbling in games outside of the hypercasual market.