New MGM Subsidiary LeoVegas Acquires Emerging Developer Push Studio for $150m

On the heels of MGM’s industry-shaking purchase of Leo Vegas, the rejuvenated Leo Vegas is purchasing Push Gaming.

Key Study

The mechanics of the deal bear further examination for iGaming stakeholders, as a study originally published in Egamingmonitor.

The Deal

As a new subsidiary of MGM, LeoVegas announced the acquisition price of Push Gaming for an estimated $150m (£119.7m/€135.8m).

Organisational Strategy

The purchase is apparently part of a greater content strategy for scaling up on the part of LeoVegas and MGM, with Push Gaming becoming the key beneficiary. The study compared the deal with similar deals and the impact on the developers who were acquired.

Push Expands

The UK-licenced 12-year-old Push Gaming Company is moving from outsourcing titles to the creation of higher-quality titles in-house.

Push’s Position

At this point, Push Gaming has nearly 50 games live across 450 sites via 47 aggregators, as established by a deliberate rate of production.

The Quality Priority

Push Gaming has been meticulously focused on quality, with less than one high-performing game per month produced--games that advanced metric statistics indicate are out-performing average studio metrics for competitor games significantly.

Push Performance Data

These metrics showing the favorable performance of Push Gaming include categories of game distribution (the number of live sites and live URLs where content is found); average position on the page; and the average number of games, with this data further stratified across Tier 1 and 2 operators.

Superior Push Position

The preceding advanced data markers indicate Push Gaming offerings are significantly above average for the numbers of sites and URLs where games are found and positioned on page.

Areas for Improvement

The data further indicates that Push has yet to meet the market standard for game portfolio and output, placing out of the Top 50 studio group performers in distribution and page position.

Previous Similar Deals

The study compares the Push acquisition to Flutter’s acquisition of Core Gaming and Cayetano; or Entain’s acquisition of CR Games, with the acquisitions in question being smaller studios whose emergence was spurred by the backing of their larger owners as a result of the takeover deals.

Forecasting the Data

The sense is that Push will likely rise quickly in terms of distribution as a result of heightened backing that the massive spending power of MGM and now LeoVegas can provide, which will translate to a scale-up of high-performing metrics, in turn enabling increased production of Push Gaming offerings.

Outlook

Bringing more gaming content in-house looks like the breakthrough for Push Gaming with the acquisition so that Push Gaming will be more competitive with other developers in performance while scaling up production.