The Japanese telecommunications company Softbank has just announced that it is acquiring a 51 percent stake in the Finnish mobile game maker Supercell for $1.5 billion, according to the New York Times.

“The combination of tablets, mobile and the free-to-play business model has created a new market for games, one that will be accessible to billions of consumers, more people than ever before in the history of games,” Ilkka Paananen, founder and chief executive of Supercell, said in a blog post. “This truly is a new era of gaming and has opened up exciting opportunities for new kinds of companies.”

Supercell is the maker of popular tablet games like “Clash of Clans” and “Hay Day.”

In addition to the 51 percent of the company that Softbank (News - Alert) is investing, fellow Japanese company Gungho Online Entertainment, which is also partially owned by Softbank, will acquire 20 percent of Supercell.

The money will go toward buying the shares of Supercell held by its employees and venture capitalists. Paananen said since the company was already profitable, there was less of a need to invest more capital into Supercell itself.

“In our quest to become the No. 1 mobile Internet company, we scour the globe in search of interesting opportunities,” Softbank CEO Masayoshi Son said in a statement. “Right now some of the most exciting companies and innovations are coming out of Finland.”

Paananen said that the two companies’ goals complemented each other. Supercell gets a more international presence, and Softbank gets a more global mobile presence as well.

“At Supercell, one of our greatest aspirations is to become the first truly global games company, one that has a strong foothold in both the West and the East, including Japan, Korea and China. We want to build a company that people all over the globe will look back in 30 years and talk about all the great games that we developed and the impact they had on people’s lives. The same way I personally feel about Nintendo, for example.”

The acquisition comes not like after Softbank announced it was purchasing Sprint Nextel (News - Alert).