Amsterdam, July 6, 2023 – Today Keesing Media Group, the world’s largest puzzle and braintainment company, has announced that it acquired CoolGames, a leading games developer of high-quality casual games for post app-store game platforms.
Keesing Media Group (Keesing) and CoolGames, both headquartered in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, have reached agreement on a takeover whereby Keesing assumes ownership of CoolGames with immediate effect. With the acquisition, Keesing aims to add casual games to its extensive portfolio of digital puzzles and braintainment products. Additionally, via CoolGames’ network of ‘instant game’ platforms and websites, Keesing will gain access to new and younger player audiences.
CoolGames is specialized in developing high quality casual games using HTML5 web technology. The company published games via many new ‘Big Tech’ platforms, such as Facebook Play, Google GameSnacks and Microsoft Start, as well as various traditional gaming websites. For its games, CoolGames often works with famous IP, such as Monopoly Sudoku (Hasbro), Angry Birds (Rovio) and Farm Merge Valley (Zynga). Last year CoolGames had a massive hit with its Battleship (Hasbro) game on Snapchat, which was played by tens of millions of people. CoolGames also develops its own games IP.
Keesing is the world’s largest puzzle- and braintainment company, with offices in 12 European countries and the US, and active in even more markets. The company specializes in publishing dozens of different puzzle types every single day, from word-finders and crosswords, to sudokus, logic puzzles and brain-training products.
Philip Alberdingk Thijm, CEO of Keesing: “The acquisition of CoolGames is a further step in putting our digital ambitions into practice. CoolGames’ platform partners will benefit from Keesing’s vast content databases and deep knowledge about good puzzles. Additionally, our current B2B media clients will be able to offer a much broader selection of both puzzles and casual games to their own clients.”
Laurens Rutten, founder of CoolGames adds: “By teaming up with Keesing, we can now bring our existing titles to players in Keesings client base of international media companies. And we also see a growing popularity of good word-games and other engaging puzzle-types in the entire games market. With Keesing’s expertise in puzzles and our know-how of both single-player and social casual games for various platforms, we expect to develop successful new IP in the coming years.”
CoolGames and its team of more than 40 game-professionals will continue to operate independently under the new Keesing ownership.