What Nazara actually bought, and when it closed
Nazara Technologies Limited, the Indian gaming group listed on the BSE (543280) and the NSE (NAZARA), confirmed in a Regulation 30 filing to both exchanges dated August 6, 2026, that Bluetile Games S.L. and BestPlay Systems S.L. have become wholly owned subsidiaries of Nazara Technologies UK Limited, and step-down subsidiaries of Nazara Technologies Limited itself, with effect from August 3, 2026. The filing, signed by company secretary Arun Bhandari, put the total consideration at USD 303.02 million, of which USD 89.45 million was paid in cash as a first tranche on August 6; the balance is due under an Amended and Restated Share Purchase Agreement, with a further update promised "in due course."
Trade press reporting puts the split at roughly USD 223 million for Bluetile and USD 80 million for BestPlay Systems, which together reported combined 2025 revenue of USD 153.6 million and EBITDA of USD 27.7 million, an 18 percent margin. That prices the deal at roughly 2 times revenue and 11 times EBITDA. Bluetile, founded in Barcelona in 2019, runs 17 live casual and social titles, among them Yatzy, Mahjong Voyage, Domino Legends and Spade Stars, with 375 million lifetime downloads and 22 million monthly active users. BestPlay, founded in 2023, operates a discovery and cross-promotion platform with 2.2 million monthly active users that drives traffic between Bluetile's own games.
A deal that started as a half-purchase
The August 3 closing is not the deal Nazara originally signed. An earlier disclosure, dated March 18, 2026, described Nazara UK acquiring only a 50 percent controlling stake in Bluetile and BestPlay for about USD 100.3 million, with a call option (and a matching put option for the sellers) to acquire the remaining half by 2028, priced at 6.6 times trailing EBITDA, on top of performance-linked earn-outs worth up to USD 98.2 million tied to 2027-2029 targets.
By August 3, the board had approved a different shape entirely: an Amended and Restated Share Purchase Agreement that dropped the stock component of the consideration and had Nazara UK acquire 100 percent of both companies' share capital at closing, for a fixed USD 303.02 million in cash. Rather than staying tied to Bluetile's future performance through an earn-out and a 2028 option, the sellers took a full, immediate exit at a fixed price.
The seller becomes group CEO, and reinvests the exit
What happened three days later complicates the word "exit." On August 6, Nazara's board also approved a preferential issue of up to 23,970,676 equity shares at INR 306 each, to raise up to INR 733.5 crore (roughly USD 77 million), subscribed entirely by the founders and senior leadership of Bluetile and BestPlay. Raymond Albaladejo Stauffer, Bluetile's founder and chief executive, is the largest single subscriber, committing roughly INR 583.5 crore (an estimated USD 61 million) of his own money. Four more Bluetile executives are named alongside him: former co-founder Marc Sylvester Schutze, chief product officer Maxime Loppin, chief marketing officer Alexandre Paul Jean Noirot-Cosson, chief technology officer Alexander Osou and general manager Hugo Remy Gaston Blavin.
Stauffer is also set to become Nazara's group chief executive from September 1, 2026, subject to regulatory approval, succeeding into a company nearly ten times Bluetile's size by revenue. Strip out the sequence and the picture is this: the founder of the company being bought sold it in full, then put close to three quarters of a Bluetile-scale sum straight back into shares of the buyer, and took the buyer's top job. That is not the behaviour of someone cashing out; it reads like someone converting an earn-out he gave up into a direct bet on the combined group he now runs.
What it means for Barcelona, and for founders weighing a strategic buyer
For Bluetile's Barcelona operation, the practical change is a longer reporting line: through Nazara UK into a BSE- and NSE-listed Indian parent, consolidating into Nazara's results from the second quarter of its 2027 financial year. Neither company has disclosed headcount or product changes tied to the deal, and Servola found no announcement of layoffs, relocation or a change to the existing games slate. What is unusual is that the person now setting group strategy is the one who built Yatzy, Mahjong Voyage, Domino Legends and Spade Stars, which argues for more product continuity than a typical roll-up, where a founder departs and a portfolio gets folded into someone else's roadmap.
For a European founder or family office weighing a strategic buyer, the multiple on the term sheet is not the whole story. Whether the buyer hands you real influence over the combined company, and whether your own leadership is willing to put its own proceeds back on the table, says more about how much of your team's roadmap survives integration than the headline price does. Nazara's move away from a phased 50 percent stake toward a full buyout, paired with its incoming Spanish-run leadership, is also a small data point in a wider pattern: profitable European casual-game studios being absorbed by Asian gaming groups at value multiples, not growth-stage prices.
Read next: AMD's Silicon Bet Creates a New Kind of Lock-In | Evernote's Owner Just Bought Your Airtable Base
