Kabam was the developer of Realm of the Mad God between June 2012 and July 2016.
The company, headquartered in Vancouver, Canada, took ownership of the game following their acquisition of Wild Shadow Studios in June 2012.
Kabam’s general manager Mike Sellers initially held stewardship over Realm until his departure in June 2013. The new general manager was ArbiterZ.
In July 2016 Kabam transferred ownership of Realm to DECA Games, the current owner of the game.
Kabam’s ownership was marked primarily by a heavy increase in monetization, particularly from the introduction of functional pets and later from Mystery Boxes and Set Tier items. These monetization mechanics caused much disdain among the playerbase, although the introduction of functional pets was necessary as the game was on the verge of being shut down due to poor profitability.
Kabam first took ownership in June 2012, during the height of a widespread item duplication exploit that devastated the player-run economy and made Amulets of Resurrection, a normally difficult-to-obtain item that could revive players once before breaking, highly commonplace. The first two dungeons Kabam released were Davy Jones’ Locker and the Mad Lab. In the autumn, they also released the Candyland Hunting Grounds, backpacks, the Cloth Bazaar, the ninja class, and character skins. Kabam also experimented with a controversial and short-lived removal of stat increase potion drops from the Godlands to encourage players to run more dungeons. They also introduced medium-tiered equipment for sale for Realm Gold in the Nexus.
Around Halloween, Kabam began taking more drastic measures to address the duplication exploits. Amulets of Resurrection were cursed, giving them a chance to turn the player into a zombie instead of reviving them. This chance increased over time until resurrection was no longer possible, essentially making the amulets useless; they were later renamed Cursed Amulet of Zombification. Kabam also released the medium-level dungeon Haunted Cemetery around this time.
An item spawning exploit arose around November 2012, causing a mass influx of unreleased items into the game. The exploit and unreleased items were soon removed, but all items were temporary made soulbound during this time. This restriction was eventually lifted, but all untiered items continued to remain soulbound to this day. There were some weekends in which untiered items could become tradable during the Kabam era (most recently in 2013).
Kabam began developing the Lair of Draconis in late 2012 and early 2013 as a new endgame dungeon that would surpass the Tomb of the Ancients in difficulty. Keys to this dungeon were accidentally sold in production servers for a low fame cost, and many players ran the unfinished dungeon and acquired its unique drops. All existing keys were turned into Consolation of Draconis keys, and the drops were converted into Cheater Armors and the Useless Katana. Development of the Lair of Draconis was put on hold, although the Rock Dragon (the event boss that would drop the dungeon) was released.
In early 2013, the low-level Forest Maze dungeon was released.
In spring 2013, the game was close to being shuttered due to low profitablity. Kabam introduced functional pets as a way to reverse the poor finances of the game. While this proved to be successful, it also had a highly detrimental effect on game balance that exists to this day, as high-level pets could fully restore HP and MP in a matter of seconds. Players also criticized the difficulty of obtaining a high-level pet without spending real money.
