Paul Thelen
Paul Thelen

Big Fish currently sits atop the GeekWire 200 list, our ranking of the top privately-held companies in the region.

And here’s a good reason why. The Seattle game maker, founded by former RealNetworks employee Paul Thelen in 2002, announced today that it has distributed more than two billion casual games to PCs and mobile devices since it was started. Even more impressive, the company posted $220 million in bookings last year, the 10th consecutive record year.

In 2011, the company reported sales of $180 million, with the business growing at a 30 percent clip.

In a release, Thelen called 2012 a “successful year of transition for Big Fish.” In fact, Thelen assumed the CEO reins last April from Jeremy Lewis and launched the company’s new cloud gaming service which allows players to play games across device.

The company grew top line bookings by nearly 20 percent last year, and Thelen says they expect the growth rate to accelerate in 2013 and 2014 because its new businesses are “now at a meaningful scale.”

“Mobile is our fastest growing platform and now accounts for 30 percent of total company bookings,” said Thelen in the release.  “A year ago we transitioned from a premium ‘games you own’ business model to providing more choices to our customers on how and where they want to play.  More than half of our mobile bookings now come from a free-to-play business model.”

Big Fish says that its games are downloaded more than one million timers per day, and that nearly every one of its 3,000 PC and Mac games made money last year.

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