Australian casino firm Aristocrat Leisure has acquired mobile and browser games developer Plarium for $500 million.

Israel-based company Plarium has worked on games such as Vikings: War of Clans (pictured), Throne: Kingdom at War and Stormfall: Age of War. It has 1,200 employees across five studios and multiple offices around Europe, Israel and the US.

The deal will be paid upfront in cash while an earn-out arrangement is also in place for shareholders for the next two years based on performance.

Plarium CEO and Co-founder Avraham Shalel will continue to lead the company.

Digital expansion

The acquisition of Plarium is said to have increased Aristocrat’s digital revenues from 14% to 22% of its overall business. Its digital revenues were previously boosted by the acquisition of Product Madness, which it claims is now a top five social casino games publisher globally.

“The acquisition of Plarium allows Aristocrat to expand our addressable market into logical adjacent segments in the fast-growing mobile gaming market,” said Aristocrat CEO Trevor Croker.

“This immediately expands our addressable market from ~US$3.2bn in the social casino segment, to ~US$25.4bn when including the strategy, RPG and casual segments.5 It also provides us with a stronger platform to target the ~US$43.6bn overall mobile and web games market as growth segments.”