Candy Crush King plans IPO valuing it at $7.6 BEEELLION

European mobile gaming firm King has updated its plans for an initial public offering in the US, telling the Securities and Exchange Commission that it wants to sell its shares for between $21 and $24 each, valuing itself at around $7.6bn.

The Candy Crush Saga-maker is hoping to sell 22.2 million stocks and raise around $533m in the process.

King will be unable to avoid comparisons with Zynga, the much-lauded Facebook gaming firm that made a splash on the market but has struggled to prove its worth since. But King is hoping that its impressive daily active user count will be enough to entice investors into its market debut.

The firm claims to have had 140 million daily active users in February this year (calculated from a monthly average) playing its games, led by a whopping 97 million people obsessed with its top title Candy Crush Saga. Unlike other web firms, King is also laying claim to making actual profits, by getting gamers to pay in-app for power-ups and extra lives. Its filing says the firm made $567.6m last year on revenue of $1.88bn.

While Zynga was caught out by the shift in its gamers from social media over to mobile, King is already making most of its money on smartphones, taking nearly three quarters of its sales from mobes in the fourth quarter of 2013.

However, the company does cop to the fact that the free-to-play model of gaming, where the app is free and the money is made after by in-game sales, is a relatively new one, making it difficult to figure out if it's a lasting market or not.

"Mobile platforms and social networks have only recently become significant distribution platforms. As a result, we have limited experience with our model and we also have limited information operating in these markets," King said in its filing. "Thus, it is difficult for us to forecast our future revenue growth, if any, and to plan our operating expenses appropriately, which in turn makes it difficult to predict our future operating results."

The company does, however, have a lot of faith in its titles.

"We believe Candy Crush Saga is one of the largest interactive entertainment franchises of all time," it said. ®