In a press release today Activision announced that they are aquiring the mobile phone app maker King, most famous for Candy Crush Saga and Candy Crush Soda Saga, for a whopping $5.9 billion.

Yes, you read that right, they bough them for almost 6 BILLION dollars. And I'm betting you thought you spent too much money on free to play games.

Just to put things in to perspective, when Disney bought Star Wars they "only" paid $4 billion, so this acquisition shows that Activision has high hopes for the mobile gaming market. And its easy to see why, according to the same press release King had an adjusted profit of $2.1 billion during the last twelve months.

 Bobby Kotick, CEO of Activion-Blizzard had this to say about the buyout:

"The combined revenues and profits solidify our position as the largest, most profitable standalone company in interactive entertainment. With a combined global network of more than half a billion monthly active users, our potential to reach audiences around the world on the device of their choosing enables us to deliver great games to even bigger audiences than ever before."

With that kind of userbase and the amount of high selling franchises Activision owns I'm imagining their investors are currently sketching out just how big their new swimming pool is going to have to be in order to hold that much money.

On a more serious note, I'm not sure what this acquisition is going to do long term but in the near future I'm expecting a lot of Activison-Blizzard branded Candy Crush games.