LONDON, Nov 3 — The creator of the addictive puzzle game Candy Crush Saga is being taken over at a 20 per cent discount to its initial public offering price, the latest proof of how difficult it is to stay on top of the mobile-gaming market.

Activision Blizzard Inc is buying Dublin-based King Digital Entertainment Plc for US$18 (RM77) a share in cash, or US$5.9 billion in total. While that’s a 16 per cent premium to King’s closing price yesterday, it’s well below the US$22.50 investors paid during the company’s IPO in March last year.

King is succumbing to a takeover after struggling to overcome an all-too-familiar problem for mobile-game makers: how to follow up with fresh hits after the initial success of a single game franchise. As King has tried to move beyond the Candy Crush Saga and its spinoff, Candy Crush Soda Saga, Finland’s Rovio Entertainment Oy has failed to replicate the success of Angry Birds and Zynga Inc in the US has attempted to lure users to titles fresher than FarmVille and Words with Friends.

King’s adjusted revenue has fallen in each of the past four quarters while gross bookings, another measure of online sales, dropped 13 per cent to US$529 million in the second quarter. Closely held Rovio had to cut jobs this year as attempts at newer games couldn’t live up to the success of its pig- destroying birds and sling shots, and Zynga has seen its shares drop by more than 70 per cent since its 2011 IPO.

“Game makers face a challenge in not only initially attracting consumers to their product, but also in maintaining interest,” said Lauren Foye, an analyst at Juniper Research. “A title can initially be a hit, but it is difficult for the franchise to continue to draw in new consumers, particularly when restricted to just one platform.”

Still, repeat success may be a matter of weathering the duds. Rovio released 50 games before hitting on Angry Birds. Zynga may have finally hit on a new trend with slot machine- based games—those bookings grew 32 per cent in the second quarter from the preceding period, helping the San Francisco- based company beat estimates and report a 30 per cent increase in revenue from a year earlier.

Activision, meanwhile, is betting there are benefits from combining its computer and console gaming prowess with King’s expertise in mobile, the fastest-growing part of the industry. Mobile platforms will account for an increasing part of the gaming market, approaching 35 per cent of the industry’s revenue by 2020, Juniper Research forecasts.

“We are seeing a continual shift by games companies in providing a cross-platform experience,” Juniper’s Foye said. “It is likely that Activision Blizzard are also attempting this diversification.” — Bloomberg