Digi-Capital: in 2018, gaming companies invested twice as much as a year earlier

In 2018, investments in gaming companies amounted to $5.7 billion. This is twice the figure for 2017, according to experts from Digi-Capital.

Contribution to development

Top 5 companies that received the largest sums for development:

• Epic Games — $1.25 billion;
• Douyu — $630 million;
• Shanda Games — $474 million;
• Huya — $462 million;
• Voodoo — $200 million.

Analysts emphasize that the $1.25 billion received by Epic Games was a record investment in a gaming company without an IPO.

In addition, the Chinese giant Tencent was noted in four of the five largest funding rounds. Each time the company acted as either a shareholder or an investor, writes VentureBeat.

In the past year, investors were most interested in the mobile direction and streaming technologies. Serious sums were also attracted by MMO, MOBA, esports disciplines, games for consoles and PC, VR and AR games.

Acquisitions

During the year, the volume of mergers and acquisitions in the gaming industry amounted to $22 billion. Of these, $10 billion is the price for the sale of a 2% stake in Tencent by the Naspers media company. Tencent itself acquired 5% of Vivendi shares from Ubisoft for $2 billion.

Again, mobile studios enjoyed the greatest success in the market of mergers and acquisitions. But also a lot of acquisition deals were concluded in PC/console and MMO/MOBA directions.

In general, Digi-Capital experts note a great consolidation of the existing market. According to their calculations, more than 75% of its revenues are accounted for by the 10 largest public gaming companies.

Also on the topic:

• Digi-Capital: Mobile market revenues will grow to $48 billion by 2020Tencent acquired a share of Warhammer developer: Vermintide
• Epic Games has announced the purchase of two technology startups