Earlier this month, EA shut down Kim Kardashian: Hollywood permanently, having removed it from app stores back in January.
Launched nearly ten years ago, it was one of the top grossing games of the mid 2010s and, as former Glu CEO Niccolo De Masi tells it, made its publisher and Kim herself “a lot of money over its lifetime”.
“The game made hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue,” he tells us. “And you know, her revenue share is a double digit percentage – you can kind of do the math.”
Insider estimates suggest the game cleared well over $600m over its lifetime, with Kim banking more than $100m from the game over the course of the last ten years. And it could have kept going, too, under different circumstances.
“I don’t think the game would have run out of steam if Kim and I were still doing it,” De Masi tells us. “When we sold Glu in 2021, I was the chairman of the company and our entire board did not go to EA – we all left.”
“Kim and I have not been personally involved since then. She probably delegated it out to someone… if the personal touch goes, it matters: it takes time and energy, and it’s to her credit this was a priority for her. She focused on this – Kim and I did all the approvals.”
In 2011, when the core team that had worked on early App Store hit Smurfs Village left to set up Blammo Games, Glu signed a deal with the studio to publish its next two titles, before acquiring the studio outright.
Blammo made several games for Glu before it landed on Stardom: Hollywood, a game in which the player worked their way up the celebrity ladder. It launched in 2012, and saw “decent success”, according to Glu’s then-publishing lead Chris Akhavan. It made about $10m in its first year – a solid performer.
But De Masi saw that over time the game had a problem getting organic installs, and decided it needed some extra star power. “I did consider other people – I mean, Paris Hilton wasn’t a nobody in 2011,” he tells us. “There were other options, it’s just that Kim and I hit it off best on the phone. And when we presented her with her character, her exact quote to me was: ‘You guys really get me.'”
The understanding was mutual, says De Masi. “She understood the game better than everybody else. She saw that there was a chance to pioneer with me and trailblaze. Kanye said this to me, after the game was already the number one grossing game, at a concert of his that Kim and I went to: ‘Niccolo, congratulations, my wife is like a real life video game character'”.
Stardom: Hollywood had been reworked and rereleased as Kim Kardashian: Hollywood in about a year, and despite the addition of Kardashian’s star power, expectations were still fairly conservative ahead of its launch, says Akhavan.
“Everyone thought this is going to be a decent, successful game, but no-one in the company was like: ‘This is gonna be a mega hit’,” he tells us. “People were hopeful it would do, like, twice as well as Stardom: Hollywood.”
Akhavan describes the soft launch as just a “quick test in Canada” for a couple of weeks – and the launch plan was just as primitive, compared to today. This was 2014, remember, and launching a mobile game was not the precise science it is now.
“Today we’d spend all this time thinking about go-to-market and have this huge marketing plan,” says Akhavan. “We put the game live and we knew Kim was going to tweet about it…we had some marketing plans and UA but it wasn’t like this huge orchestrated thing.”
“All it took was Kim to tweet…back then we used to put a lot of importance on getting Apple featuring and Google featuring, but in this case, we set the game live and the app stores had not yet featured it, we had not yet turned on any paid marketing or really any kind of marketing…Kim literally just posted about it on her social media and then that was it – it just blew up.”
Kardashian’s social media posts “crushed the entire go-to-market plan” in terms of impact, says Akhavan. “It went super viral, everyone was talking about it, all of the Hollywood media and TV shows, CNN…it just became this massive word of mouth thing, all just from her posts.”
The game became profitable within a week, says Akhavan, having been made by a relatively small Blammo team in Toronto. “Games back then were like 14 people…really lean. It was maybe three or four million dollars to build the game,” he says.
Reports at the time suggested that Kim Kardashian: Hollywood made $50m in its first four months. By 2016, a Forbes cover story about Kardashian and her game claimed it had generated 45m downloads and $160m in revenue – extraordinary numbers for a mobile game in the mid 2010s.
And its player base was always hungry for more and more content – so Glu turned the game’s updates into a kind of extension of Kardashian’s real life, says Akhavan. “We didn’t even call it live ops back then, but we were like, oh shit, there’s a bunch of people playing this and they have consumed all the content,” he continues. “We needed to start adding content to this game more frequently.”
“She was a great partner,” Akhavan continues. “She created all this content, she was willing to come to the studio and do voiceovers and get deeply involved, give us ideas on how to make the game relevant for her audience, what kind of storylines and characters to include…she was very involved.”
“If she was going to Paris Fashion Week or something like that we would connect that into the game so it felt like it was basically following along what Kim was doing in the real world,” Akhavan continues. “It was very natural from a live ops perspective. It was like okay, Kim is going to be having a big Halloween and she’s always big on her Halloween costume – that naturally creates content for the game.”
When Kardashian was having her first child, she suggested that players should be able to have babies in the game, so Glu added it. She also pulled some strings to get some big-name fashion labels like Karl Lagerfeld into the game, as well as secure a multitude of in-game cameos from her extended family and celebrity circles.
Throughout 2016 and beyond, the game settled into a post-launch rhythm, running those live ops to keep up with Kardashian’s adventures. Appmagic says it was earning Glu between $1-2m in monthly IAP revenue up until COVID hit, when it spiked dramatically, generating nearly $6m in April 2020.
But it was effectively all downhill from April 2021, when EA bought Glu for $2.1bn. The game’s monthly revenue has been in decline ever since that deal was completed, and Akahavan suggests that the closure of the game coincided with the expiration of Glu’s licensing deal with Kardashian, which was last renewed in 2020.
When the game’s closure was announced, it hit headlines across the mainstream media, and some players dressed in funeral wear to mourn the passing of the game. Kardashian told TMZ: “I’m so grateful from the bottom of my heart to everyone who has loved and played Kim Kardashian: Hollywood in the past 10 years.”
“This journey has meant so much to me but I’ve realized that it’s time to focus that energy into other passions. I want to thank the Glu team and the many people behind the scenes who have worked diligently on making it a success.”
Looking back on his time on the game, Akhavan characterises it as a live ops pioneer. “I’m sure if that game had all of the secret sauce of modern free to play at launch it could have been a billion dollar franchise,” he adds.
And De Masi suggests that through Kim Kardashian: Hollywood, Glu had harnessed the power of celebrity culture and broken new ground for the games business as a whole. “It was my business model and we had created a new category…most people in the games business don’t create a new category.”
“She helped us add part of her universe to the game,” he adds. “Fashion designers, hair and makeup…it was all self-reinforcing. Frankly, to this day, nobody else has ever pulled off anything like this.”
