Activision’s King quietly acquires analytics firm Omniata

Activision Blizzard’s King mobile game division has acquired analytics and engagement firm Omniata, GamesBeat has learned. No purchase price was disclosed.

The deal is consistent with King’s practice of using internal analytics and marketing as much as possible to promote its games, such as Candy Crush Saga. Those games have been played by billions of people, but King needs a constant flow of data to figure out how to best acquire new users.

In a statement, a spokesperson for King said in response to a query, “We can confirm we have acquired Omniata. It’s a great team and a proven platform that will add to King’s analytical and technology capabilities.”

Once it has the users, King needs to figure out which players are likely to make purchases in its free-to-play games, where only a small percentage usually pays. Then it targets those who pay or don’t pay with different kinds of incentives to encourage them to spend more. Omniata is one of the companies that helps game companies figure that out.

Omniata was founded by Alex Arias, its CEO. Back in 2014, when the company came out of stealth mode, he announced that the company was processing 190 billion events per month for game and app developers, helping companies understand their users and why they were playing or dropping out.

In 2014, Omniata disclosed it had raised $6.8 million. The investors included Nordic venture capital firm Creandum, which was the first institutional investor in Spotify, and Sigma West.