Spil Games

Spil Games is a privately owned company based in Hilversum near Amsterdam in the Netherlands and has more than 150 employees. The company publishes free-to-play games for iPhone, iPad and Android devices, and the web and Facebook.

Its best known mobile games include the Troll Face Quest series and My Dolphin Show. In June 2016 the company launched Top League Manager - its first football management game.

Spil Games announced that they had bought the Creatures IP from BigBen and were developing Creatures Family in March 2016.

History
Spill Group was formed by two Dutch entrepreneurs in 2001. The first online games website was launched in 2004, in the Dutch market. At this time, the target audience was mostly teenaged girls.

In 2007 Spill Group acquired a majority share in the Chinese game development company zLong and began producing games. In 2007, portals were also expanded to the US and UK.

The 2008 acquisition of the MMO (massive multiplayer online) site/community, onrpg.com, moved the company into the MMORPG segment.

In July 2008, Spill group changed the company name and rebranded to Spil Games.

As of March 2009, Spil Games was the largest casual games site worldwide. In total, Spil Games expanded its segmented and localized approach with more than 50 websites where people can play games online in 20 languages.

In May 2014 the company announced that it will let go of a substantial portion of its work force - 90 out of 240 full time positions - as a result of a move from website to mobile and tablet games.

In September 2014, the company reorganised, closing its Dutch development studio and concentrating on mobile game publishing.

Turnaround
In February 2015, a new CEO was appointed. Tung Nguyen-Khac had been CEO of the gaming division of the German television company ProSiebenSat1. Venturebeat said of the move: “With the mobile-gaming industry growing to $25 billion in 2014, it’s not surprising that a company like Spil would look for new leadership to help get a bigger piece of that action.”

New games
In the first part of 2016, the company announced and launched several game brands.

In February 2016, it purchased the rights to the classic game Creatures, announcing Creatures Family.

In April 2016, Atari founder Nolan Bushnell announced that he would be working with Spil to develop several new mobile games

In May 2016, the company bought the Mousebreaker web gaming site

Spil Games is creating the official mobile game tie-in for the 2017 science fiction film Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets. It will be a strategy game and launch prior to the film's premiere in July.

Spil Games' Endless Lake was one of the launch titles for Facebook's HTML5 Instant Games platform, later winning a "Best of Instant Games" award.

Creatures Alchemist is a minigame by Spil themed around Creatures.

Audience
Spil Games has more than 115 million monthly active users. In mobile, the company started from nowhere and reached 2.6m weekly installs by December 2015. Cumulative new installs exceeded 50m in 2015. As of August 2016, Spil Games achieved 100 million downloads, a goal they had originally set for the end of 2016. The CEO stated that this was very encouraging because they don't put much of their budget into marketing.

Mobile games
Spil’s top mobile games in the Apple App Store and Google Play include:
 * The Trollface Quest series
 * My Dolphin Show
 * The Crash Drive series
 * The Operate Now Series

Web games
The company publishes thousands of web games through its web portals. These include:

www.GamesGames.com

www.Agame.com

GirlsGoGames.com

A10.com

Mousebreaker.com

Recent launches
June 2016: Top League Manager — a football (soccer) manager game