'Call of Duty' publisher Activision to buy 'Candy Crush' creator King for $5.9 billion

Activision Blizzard, the publisher of video games such as Call of Duty and Skylanders, announced Monday night that it has signed an agreement to acquire King Digital Entertainment for $5.9 billion. King is most well-known as the developer of the hit mobile game Candy Crush Saga.

To put that in perspective, in 2012 Disney purchased Lucasfilm (i.e. Star Wars) for $4.05 billion. They paid about the same amount to purchase Marvel in 2009.

It's more than the $2.5 billion Microsoft paid for Minecraft developer Mojang in 2014.

It's also much more than the highly talked about (at the time) $200 million purchase by Zynga for Draw Something developer OMGPOP. (That purchase did not have a happy ending.)

Activision is paying King shareholders $18 per share -- a 20 percent premium over the company's closing price on October 30.

believes that the addition of King's highly-complementary business will position

as a global leader in interactive entertainment across mobile, console and PC platforms, and positions the company for future growth," the announcement says. "The combined company will have a world-class interactive entertainment portfolio of top-performing franchises, including two of the top five highest-grossing mobile games in the U.S. (

Candy Crush Saga, Candy Crush Soda Saga

), the world's most successful console game franchise (

Call of Duty

), and the world's most successful personal computing franchise (

World of Warcraft

), as well as such well known franchises as Blizzard Entertainment's

Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft

,

StarCraft

, and

Diablo

and Activision Publishing's

Guitar Hero

,

Skylanders

and

Destiny

, along with over 1,000 game titles in its library."

Activision CEO (and Moneyball "star") Bobby Kotick said, "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."

So Activision now owns one of the most popular and profitable mobile games of all time, though the purchase price has raised some eyebrows on social media. Candy Crush and its "Saga" spin-offs have made a lot of money, but it remains to be seen if they can make the kind of money that justifies paying $1.9 billion more than Star Wars was supposedly worth.

Of course, then you could imagine King being tasked with making some sort of addictive Call of Duty mobile game or a Skylanders crossover with Candy Crush and then maybe, just maybe, there's potential for a lot of money to be made here.