Bill Kara Adds 72 Million Users to His Addicting Games Empire With Acquisition of Mope.io 

Long time DNJournal readers are familiar with the remarkable story of how Bill Kara built a gaming empire at AddictingGames.com (it is a story we first told a decade ago in our March 2010 Cover Story). Bill first attracted our attention when someone paid $350,000 for CookingGames.com at the beginning of that year and people in the domain business couldn't understand how a domain like that could be worth so much money.

When we looked into it we found out that "someone" was Bill and that he knew a lot more about domains related to games than the rest of us did. From experience, Kara knew that specifically targeted .com domains could drive enormous traffic to the web and mobile based games he had been building for years. In fact, by the time he got around to picking up CookingGames.com, Bill had already spent over $4 million on similar gaming domains that proved to be excellent investments. 

Now Kara, a native Canadian who is now based in Santa Monica, California, is back in the news with another major acquisition, but this one with an interesting twist - instead of a .com he purchased a .io - Mope.io to be exact. Also, Bill bought an already developed game this time - 

Bill Kara
CEO, Addicting Games  

one that comes with a huge existing fan base of more than 72 million users! As big as that number is, Bill thinks his company can make it bigger by improving the top down multi-player animal survival game and optimizing its functionality.

The price he paid for Mope.io was not disclosed and could not have been charted in any case because this was the sale of a developed property rather than a domain only. Still, it is interesting to see Bill, who had been very much a .com guy, raiding an alternate TLD camp. Of course, .io has been rapidly gaining favor in recent years and one that comes with the kind of traffic mope.io does would be welcomed by anyone with open arms. Mope.io is not the first gaming hit built on the TLD either. Bill noted, “The trend towards .io domains in online gaming is very strong with smash hits like slither.io, mope.io, krunker.io and others serving millions of monthly players all using the IO extension."  It's not just .io either. Bill added, "The most popular online portal for IO Games itself is in fact built in .space, Iogames.space, of all things.”

Whatever the TLD may be, Bill continues to win in the game world. With 21 employees helping him release dozens of new games every month he expects AddictingGames.com to generate $5 million in revenue this year. Gaming traffic is higher than ever with so many people staying home and relying on their computer or mobile device for entertainment due to the Covid-19 pandemic. In a way, we are all playing a survival game in the real world right now, but as Bill's company has shown, many companies will not only survive but thrive in conditions that threaten many others.   

(Posted September 29, 2020)

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