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Biggest Online Gambling Companies

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Casino Companies. There are several large casino and gaming companies that own the majority of casinos around the U.S. For instance, there are MGM Resorts and Caesars Entertainment Corporation casinos in several different cities. Some of these major gaming corporations even work with tribes to develop casino operations on tribal lands. GVC Holdings is one of the largest sports betting companies and gaming groups. With its unique proprietary technology platform, GVC offers casino, poker, bingo, and sports betting under some of the industry's most popular online betting brands including partypoker, CasinoClub, Betboo, Bwin, Foxy Bingo, and Sportingbet.

The video gaming industry is one of the most competitive businesses in the world. Heavy-hitters like Sony and Microsoft are backed by decades of profit making in other electronics and computers. Other companies are on the list on the strength of strong sales for historically popular games. The newer players – mostly companies outside the US – are players in the mobile gaming divisions.

The entire industry made over $40 billion in revenue in 2018 according to Forbes Online. The top five game companies made most of that profit. The smaller companies struggle, and even some top publishers are laying off employees. There may be some changes in the bottom five on this list year to year, but the top five are probably there to stay.

  1. Gung Ho Online

Location: Tokyo
2018 Revenue: $1.6 billion
Best-selling game: Puzzles and Dragons
Founded: 1998


Source: Gung Ho Entertainment

This company has built its fortune in the online gaming market. It started business as a developer of an online auction site as a subsidiary of Japanese cell phone company Softbank. In 2000, the company switched to online gaming services, hosting servers in Japan for a MMOG. In 2013, it released an in-house developed mobile game, Puzzles & Dragons, which accounts for the majority of its revenue. It has also acquired other game publishers since it purchased back shares from Softbank.

Did You Know?

Puzzles & Dragons is the second-highest earning mobile game ever.

  1. Ubisoft

Location: Paris
2018 Revenue: $1.9 billion USD
Best-selling game: Assassins' Creed
Founded: 1986


Source: Gage Skidmore [CC BY SA 2.0] via Flickr

Ubi Soft was originally a family-owned, mail order hardware and software business run from the suburbs of Paris. It was a family business whose members soon recognized the growing interest in PC games. Ubi Soft developed some titles in-house that were successful in Europe but did not translate well overseas. Eventually, the company purchased rights to distribute other titles, which enabled them to buy Red Storm Games, the maker of a popular game based on the Tom Clancy novels.

Aside from the Assassin's Creed series, Ubisoft is known for the Far Cry series and Just Dance.

Did You Know?

Electronic Arts bought, and later sold, shares in Ubisoft.

  1. King

Location: Stockholm, Sweden
2018 Revenue: $1.9 billion
Best-selling game: Candy Crush saga
Founded: 2003


Source: Iswjy1mcb [CC By SA 4.0] via Wikimedia Commons
Wsop poker recall codes.

King initially developed games that users could play within their web browser, eliminating the need to download and/or install software. That model didn't prove successful initially. However, the company found success producing games for use on social media platforms like Facebook.

Within social media gaming, King would make money via so-called 'micro-transactions' and through in-game advertising. This caused revenue growth of over $1 billion within two years.

Did You Know?

One of the co-founders of King sold his ownership stake years before the company became one of the top earners.

  1. Namco Bandai

Location: Tokyo
2018 Revenue: $2.20 billion
Best-selling game: Tekken series
Founded: 2005


Source: Bandai Namco [Public Domain] via Wikimedia Commons

Gambling

Namco was already a well-known arcade game company. Bandai, a toy maker and TV show producer, has some of the world's best-known brands, like Power Rangers. In 2005, the gaming divisions of the two companies merged.

The merged Namco Bandai Studios has some of the longest running and most popular console fighting games, such as Tekken and Soul Caliber. It also has released a number of games based on Bandai-owned IP like Dragonball and Gundam.

Did You Know?

The Bandai Namco manufacturing division is the largest toy company in the world based on revenue.

  1. Electronic Arts

Location: Redwood City, CA
2018 Revenue: $3.49 billion
Best-selling game: FIFA 18
Founded: 1982


Source: King of Hearts [CC BY SA 3.0] via Wikipedia

Electronic Arts may be one of the most widely recognized brands in gaming culture. Former Apple employee Trip Hawkins started the company with financing and began producing a variety of games for the growing home computer market. It was a few years after the company began that EA began working on a pro football simulator that would spawn one of its more popular games, Madden NFL.

EA's sports games are what made the company a success. However, EA acquired a number of studios over time, producing or co-producing popular games from other subgenres.

Did You Know?

Former UCLA basketball star Ed O'Bannon sued EA for using his likeness without permission. EA settled with O'Bannon, but stopped making college sports games because of the suit.

  1. Activision Blizzard

Location: Santa Monica, CA
2018 Revenue: $3.5 billion
Best-selling game: Overwatch, WoW
Founded: 2008


Source: Activision Blizzard [Public Domain] via Wikimedia Commons

Activision and Blizzard were separately to of the most successful game publishers and developers of the 1990s, with Activision being one of the oldest companies in the business. During a downturn in the home gaming industry, Activision was purchased by a tech CEO and regained market share.

Blizzard was a pioneer in the online, multiplayer strategy games like Warcraft. The French company Vivendi purchased Blizzard, and Activision later acquired Vivendi's gaming division, which included Blizzard.

Did You Know?

Activision was responsible for many of the earliest popular console games, including Pitfall first sold for the Atari 2600 in 1982.

  1. Nintendo Company

Location: Kyoto, Japan
2018 Revenue: $4.2 billion
Best-selling game: the Mario series
Founded: 1886


Source: Evan-Amos [Public Domain] via Wikimedia Commons

Nintendo was in the gaming business long before computers were invented, making playing cards, and later on, toys and arcade games. It entered the console game industry in the 1970s when it distributed the Odyssey console in Japan. In 1981, it developed and released Donkey Kong, the game that spawned the signature character Mario.

Nintendo is perhaps better known for the consoles and gaming devices it has created rather than its games. The company produced a console in 1977 before launching the Famicom, NES and Game Boy systems later.

Did You Know?

The French Culture Minister knighted Shigeru Miyamoto, the creator of Donkey Kong, in 2006.

  1. Microsoft (Xbox Games)

Location: Seattle, WA
2018 Revenue: $7.79 billion
Best-selling game: Halo, Minecraft
Founded: 2002


Source: Pexels [CC0]

Bill Gates' company had always had an in-house game division that produced and published games with the MS-DOS operating system and for Windows. The company created a separate division for games in 2000 when it entered the console gaming arena and announced the Xbox.

Xbox Games develops and publishes games for the PC and for the console as well as publishing mobile and web browser games. It has also acquired Mojang, the developer and publisher of Minecraft.

Did You Know?

The Microsoft game Minesweeper has been included with every version of Windows (in some form) since 1992.

  1. Tencent Games

Location: 2003
2018 Revenue: $8.3 billion
Best-selling game: Arena of Valor
Founded: 2003


Source: Public Domain

Tencent Games is a division of Tencent Holdings, a Chinese holding company with a variety of business interests, including online gaming. From the beginning, the gaming company focused on online and social media gaming to meet the interests of the growing Chinese mobile communications market. Its parent company has invested in a variety of game publishers and hosts.

Today the company continues to focus on online and mobile gaming and has its own streaming platform. It's the largest valued game company.

Did You Know?

Tencent's purchase of 40% of the company that makes Fortnite may make the company the largest in the world by revenue soon.

  1. Sony Computer Entertainment (SCE)

Location: Tokyo
2018 Revenue: $10.5 billion
Best-selling game: The Last of US, Gran Turismo
Founded: 2003


Source: Solomon 203 [CC BY SA 4.0] via Wikimedia Commons

A division of electronics and entertainment conglomerate Sony, SCE began in 1993 when Sony announced the production of the Playstation game console. Since then, SCE has become the largest video game company in the world based on annual revenue.

SCE oversees the production of the hardware and peripherals for Playstation games. It is also the parent company of Sony Interactive Entertainment Worldwide (SIE), the company that oversees the production of Sony games. Many of the studios under SIE were acquired by takeover.

Did You Know?

Sony's revenue comes from its hardware, as it only placed two games (Marvel's Spider Man and God of War) in the top ten list in 2018.


We Live Security looks at six of the biggest online gaming hacks to date – From Xbox Live and PSN, to Big Fish Games and Steam.

Online gaming systems and apps are a common target for cybercriminals, looking to do everything from improving their own scores and grabbing new game features to stealing Bitcoin wallets. We now look at six of the biggest online gaming hacks to date.

1. Sony PlayStation Network

The Sony PlayStation Network was famously hacked back in April 2011, resulting not only in the compromise of up to 77 million accounts, but also downtime which prevented users of the PlayStation 3 and PlayStation Portable consoles from playing online through the service.

The attack continued for two days, eventually forcing Sony to turn off the PlayStation Network on April 20 – a downtime which lasted for 23 days. The Japanese electronics giant admitted that personally identifiable information from each of the 77 million accounts was breached, with 12,000 encrypted credit card details potentially accessed as well.

This breach remains one of the biggest in the 21st century, and has been described as the fourth biggest of all time, going by records lost. Sony said that the outage costs set the firm back a whopping $171 million.

2. Xbox Live, PlayStation Network (again)

Father Christmas may bring presents on Christmas Day, but the gifts handed out by hactivism collective the ‘Lizard Squad' were less well received, especially by Sony and Microsoft, on 25th December 2014.

The group launched a series of distributed-denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks against Xbox Live and the Sony PlayStation Network (PSN) on Christmas Day, bringing down both services and leaving gamers young and old twiddling their thumbs instead of their gamepads, unable to play the latest releases.

Access to PSN and Xbox Live was eventually restored between 24 and 48 hours later, but the attack gave a good example of the growing skills in hactivism groups and showed just how disruptive cyberattacks can be.

3. Steam

The online video game service Steam was the subject of a massive data breach in 2011, which resulted in attackers compromising login details for one of its discussion forums as well as a database which held ID and credit card data, hashed and salted passwords, game purchases, email addresses, billing addresses and encrypted credit card information.

Fortunately, service owner Valve said that there was no evidence that credit cards had been misused or Steam accounts abused. Valve took the forums offline after learning of the attack.

Passwords, credit card details, billing addresses and more were stolen in a Steam breach in 2013.

The firm quickly begun their own investigation, advised forum users to change their passwords, and on other accounts if the same as used for Steam.

Steam is a gaming service that lets people buy, download, play and chat about a huge variety of games. It is used by around 35 million users worldwide.

4. Gamigo

Back in 2012, Germany-based free online gaming site Gamigo was hacked, with hackers posting as many as 11 million passwords online after they had penetrated the website's defenses. Swtor smuggler s casino chip.

These passwords were published onto a forum, and contained 8.2 million unique email addresses. Gamigo warned users in early March that an 'attack on the Gamigo database' had exposed hashed passwords and usernames and possibly other 'additional personal data.' The site required users to change their account passwords.

The dump of passwords contained email addresses from Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail and many other services, indicating that some Gamigo users may have used the same password for other accounts.

Biggest Online Gambling Companies Publicly Traded

5. Big Fish Games

Back in February of this year, Seattle-based gaming company Big Fish Games revealed that it had suffered from a data breach in which hackers made off with customer payment information.

Largest online gambling companies 2019

Namco was already a well-known arcade game company. Bandai, a toy maker and TV show producer, has some of the world's best-known brands, like Power Rangers. In 2005, the gaming divisions of the two companies merged.

The merged Namco Bandai Studios has some of the longest running and most popular console fighting games, such as Tekken and Soul Caliber. It also has released a number of games based on Bandai-owned IP like Dragonball and Gundam.

Did You Know?

The Bandai Namco manufacturing division is the largest toy company in the world based on revenue.

  1. Electronic Arts

Location: Redwood City, CA
2018 Revenue: $3.49 billion
Best-selling game: FIFA 18
Founded: 1982


Source: King of Hearts [CC BY SA 3.0] via Wikipedia

Electronic Arts may be one of the most widely recognized brands in gaming culture. Former Apple employee Trip Hawkins started the company with financing and began producing a variety of games for the growing home computer market. It was a few years after the company began that EA began working on a pro football simulator that would spawn one of its more popular games, Madden NFL.

EA's sports games are what made the company a success. However, EA acquired a number of studios over time, producing or co-producing popular games from other subgenres.

Did You Know?

Former UCLA basketball star Ed O'Bannon sued EA for using his likeness without permission. EA settled with O'Bannon, but stopped making college sports games because of the suit.

  1. Activision Blizzard

Location: Santa Monica, CA
2018 Revenue: $3.5 billion
Best-selling game: Overwatch, WoW
Founded: 2008


Source: Activision Blizzard [Public Domain] via Wikimedia Commons

Activision and Blizzard were separately to of the most successful game publishers and developers of the 1990s, with Activision being one of the oldest companies in the business. During a downturn in the home gaming industry, Activision was purchased by a tech CEO and regained market share.

Blizzard was a pioneer in the online, multiplayer strategy games like Warcraft. The French company Vivendi purchased Blizzard, and Activision later acquired Vivendi's gaming division, which included Blizzard.

Did You Know?

Activision was responsible for many of the earliest popular console games, including Pitfall first sold for the Atari 2600 in 1982.

  1. Nintendo Company

Location: Kyoto, Japan
2018 Revenue: $4.2 billion
Best-selling game: the Mario series
Founded: 1886


Source: Evan-Amos [Public Domain] via Wikimedia Commons

Nintendo was in the gaming business long before computers were invented, making playing cards, and later on, toys and arcade games. It entered the console game industry in the 1970s when it distributed the Odyssey console in Japan. In 1981, it developed and released Donkey Kong, the game that spawned the signature character Mario.

Nintendo is perhaps better known for the consoles and gaming devices it has created rather than its games. The company produced a console in 1977 before launching the Famicom, NES and Game Boy systems later.

Did You Know?

The French Culture Minister knighted Shigeru Miyamoto, the creator of Donkey Kong, in 2006.

  1. Microsoft (Xbox Games)

Location: Seattle, WA
2018 Revenue: $7.79 billion
Best-selling game: Halo, Minecraft
Founded: 2002


Source: Pexels [CC0]

Bill Gates' company had always had an in-house game division that produced and published games with the MS-DOS operating system and for Windows. The company created a separate division for games in 2000 when it entered the console gaming arena and announced the Xbox.

Xbox Games develops and publishes games for the PC and for the console as well as publishing mobile and web browser games. It has also acquired Mojang, the developer and publisher of Minecraft.

Did You Know?

The Microsoft game Minesweeper has been included with every version of Windows (in some form) since 1992.

  1. Tencent Games

Location: 2003
2018 Revenue: $8.3 billion
Best-selling game: Arena of Valor
Founded: 2003


Source: Public Domain

Tencent Games is a division of Tencent Holdings, a Chinese holding company with a variety of business interests, including online gaming. From the beginning, the gaming company focused on online and social media gaming to meet the interests of the growing Chinese mobile communications market. Its parent company has invested in a variety of game publishers and hosts.

Today the company continues to focus on online and mobile gaming and has its own streaming platform. It's the largest valued game company.

Did You Know?

Tencent's purchase of 40% of the company that makes Fortnite may make the company the largest in the world by revenue soon.

  1. Sony Computer Entertainment (SCE)

Location: Tokyo
2018 Revenue: $10.5 billion
Best-selling game: The Last of US, Gran Turismo
Founded: 2003


Source: Solomon 203 [CC BY SA 4.0] via Wikimedia Commons

A division of electronics and entertainment conglomerate Sony, SCE began in 1993 when Sony announced the production of the Playstation game console. Since then, SCE has become the largest video game company in the world based on annual revenue.

SCE oversees the production of the hardware and peripherals for Playstation games. It is also the parent company of Sony Interactive Entertainment Worldwide (SIE), the company that oversees the production of Sony games. Many of the studios under SIE were acquired by takeover.

Did You Know?

Sony's revenue comes from its hardware, as it only placed two games (Marvel's Spider Man and God of War) in the top ten list in 2018.


We Live Security looks at six of the biggest online gaming hacks to date – From Xbox Live and PSN, to Big Fish Games and Steam.

Online gaming systems and apps are a common target for cybercriminals, looking to do everything from improving their own scores and grabbing new game features to stealing Bitcoin wallets. We now look at six of the biggest online gaming hacks to date.

1. Sony PlayStation Network

The Sony PlayStation Network was famously hacked back in April 2011, resulting not only in the compromise of up to 77 million accounts, but also downtime which prevented users of the PlayStation 3 and PlayStation Portable consoles from playing online through the service.

The attack continued for two days, eventually forcing Sony to turn off the PlayStation Network on April 20 – a downtime which lasted for 23 days. The Japanese electronics giant admitted that personally identifiable information from each of the 77 million accounts was breached, with 12,000 encrypted credit card details potentially accessed as well.

This breach remains one of the biggest in the 21st century, and has been described as the fourth biggest of all time, going by records lost. Sony said that the outage costs set the firm back a whopping $171 million.

2. Xbox Live, PlayStation Network (again)

Father Christmas may bring presents on Christmas Day, but the gifts handed out by hactivism collective the ‘Lizard Squad' were less well received, especially by Sony and Microsoft, on 25th December 2014.

The group launched a series of distributed-denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks against Xbox Live and the Sony PlayStation Network (PSN) on Christmas Day, bringing down both services and leaving gamers young and old twiddling their thumbs instead of their gamepads, unable to play the latest releases.

Access to PSN and Xbox Live was eventually restored between 24 and 48 hours later, but the attack gave a good example of the growing skills in hactivism groups and showed just how disruptive cyberattacks can be.

3. Steam

The online video game service Steam was the subject of a massive data breach in 2011, which resulted in attackers compromising login details for one of its discussion forums as well as a database which held ID and credit card data, hashed and salted passwords, game purchases, email addresses, billing addresses and encrypted credit card information.

Fortunately, service owner Valve said that there was no evidence that credit cards had been misused or Steam accounts abused. Valve took the forums offline after learning of the attack.

Passwords, credit card details, billing addresses and more were stolen in a Steam breach in 2013.

The firm quickly begun their own investigation, advised forum users to change their passwords, and on other accounts if the same as used for Steam.

Steam is a gaming service that lets people buy, download, play and chat about a huge variety of games. It is used by around 35 million users worldwide.

4. Gamigo

Back in 2012, Germany-based free online gaming site Gamigo was hacked, with hackers posting as many as 11 million passwords online after they had penetrated the website's defenses. Swtor smuggler s casino chip.

These passwords were published onto a forum, and contained 8.2 million unique email addresses. Gamigo warned users in early March that an 'attack on the Gamigo database' had exposed hashed passwords and usernames and possibly other 'additional personal data.' The site required users to change their account passwords.

The dump of passwords contained email addresses from Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail and many other services, indicating that some Gamigo users may have used the same password for other accounts.

Biggest Online Gambling Companies Publicly Traded

5. Big Fish Games

Back in February of this year, Seattle-based gaming company Big Fish Games revealed that it had suffered from a data breach in which hackers made off with customer payment information.

The firm discovered the breach on January 12 and said that malware was installed on the billing and payment pages of the company's website. Hackers subsequently intercepted customer data including names, addresses, payment card numbers, expiration dates and CVV2 codes.

Gamers were again put at risk when Big Fish was hacked in February last year

Big Fish Games stressed that only customers who had entered new payment information on the company's website between 24 December 2014 and January 8, 2015 may be affected. Those who used payment information from a previously saved profile don't appear to be impacted – and the same applied to customers buying games on Facebook, iOS or Android.

Founded in 2002, Big Fish claims to be the world's largest producer and distributor of casual games. The company says it has distributed more than 2.5 billion games to customers in over 150 countries.

6. Various (South Korea)

In August of last year, South Korean authorities confirmed that 27 million individuals in the country had been hit by a massive data breach – a figure which means nearly 70 percent of the population between 15 and 65 years of age were affected, according to Tech Worm.

The breach came to light after the law enforcement arrested 16 individuals who were suspected either of the attack itself, or of trying to sell the records on.

One criminal, known only as 'Kim', was apparently attempting to sell over 220 million items of personal information after allegedly buying these details from a hacker.

The police suspected that 'Kim' used the personal information to steal online game currency by using a hacking tool. This tool logs onto a user's account once the log-in details are entered. If the passwords were wrong, he allegedly bought the personal information on ID cards and their issue dates from a retailer in Daegu, to change the passwords himself.

Online Gaming Companies

The data, which included account logins and registration numbers, was stolen after attackers hacked registration pages for online games, movie ticketing and ringtone downloads. Online gambling promotion services were also affected, reported Korea's Joongang Daily at the time.

Biggest Online Gambling Companies 2020

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