Aristocrat Leisure is one of the leading gambling machine manufacturers in Australia. They started manufacturing gambling machines during the 1950s, and continued to the present as an online casino operator.
In 2017, they made a billion-dollar deal to acquire Big Fish, a United States based company which specializes in the creation of online and social casino games. Big Fish is headquartered in Seattle, Washington, and Aristocrat Leisure is reported to have paid $990 million to acquire the company.
Three years ago, Big Fish was purchased by Kentucky Derby, owned by Churchill Downs, for $885 million, and it is unclear why he would sold the company to Aristocrat Leisure after owning it for only a short time.
Aristocrat Leisure states that the reason why they are buying Big Fish is because of the revenue that it will bring, and they believe that operating social casino games which pays real money and online games which are only for pure entertainment is a perfect combination that will send them to new heights.
According to experts and analysts, this giant move by Aristocrat Leisure will affect them positively. The company has been making millions of dollars from operating their games, and with the acquisition of Big Fish, new markets and opportunities will open for Aristocrat Leisure which will greatly increase their profits.
As of 2017, Aristocrat Leisure has a total of 5,000 employees worldwide, and they have been signing gigantic deals worth hundreds of millions.
They acquired a North American virtual gambling company for $1.3 billion and an Israeli mobile game developer for $500 million. These deals made Aristocrat Leisure the second largest online and social casino games operator in the world, only behind Playtika, another online casino business owned by the Chinese.
It is projected that Aristocrat Leisure will be able to make more than $1 billion in revenues after the acquisition of Big Fish, and they can eclipse Zynga in terms of revenues made if the trend would continue. Zynga is currently the largest online social games developer in the world today, having a market value of $3.5 billion.
If everything goes perfectly fine, the deal will be closed sometime during the first three months of 2018. The deal is one of the largest in the history of online and social casino games, but experts are also warning about the possible risks that Aristocrat Leisure would face once the deal is signed.
They stated that the industry of online casino gaming is growing at a slow pace, and even though the industry is creating hundreds of billions of dollars in revenues worldwide, the loyal population who are playing online casino games to earn real cash is slowly decreasing.
Younger players tend to play other games instead, which does not require the payment or earning of real money, and if the trend continues, the industry will die. Aristocrat Leisure, on the other hand, is positive with the deal that they made to acquire Big Fish. They claimed that it will be good for their business, and they would have a better control with the industry once they acquire the company.
