Background info
- Activision beforehand is one of the only major game companies in comparison to say EA (which also runs Chillingo) and Ubisoft as examples that doesn't have a major mobile presence. Thus buying out a company that has a popular position in mobile makes sense instead of trying to invest money into creating one from scratch.
- King's 8 out of 11 games stay consistently in the top 200 grossing iOS apps, with the exception of two games: Bubble Witch Saga, and Papa Bear Saga. Grossing means the amount of profits earned from in-app purchases (microtransactions), since all of their games are freemium.
- King didn't straight up start off as a mobile game company. I did a bit of research that's out of the usual Wikipedia stuff; it seems the company started off as a social platform of playing games online to win money, not like in a casino like way like slots or gambling as far as I know skimming at the archived main page.
I can speculate that one of their revenue streams is going to run out soon, and it makes sense for the company to get into the action by utilzing money, but why that much?!
The only other reason I posted is that Skylanders is made by Activision, thus bring this news may bear relations to how the Skylanders brand may financially perform, if it is one of the brands that may fall by the wayside.