Even if the gaming industry is still affected by tough comparisons with a pandemic-driven 2021, there are some encouraging signs giving confidence in the 2023 outlook. Notably, console sales, which had been underwhelming due to supply constraints, have been accelerating in the last three months and reached 19% growth in the US in September according…
In line with recent press reports, Tencent has acquired a 49.9% stake in Ubisoft’s family holding company, Guillemot Brothers Ltd (which owns a 13% stake in Ubisoft), in a deal that values the French video game maker (a portfolio company) around EUR75-80 per share and reflects a premium around 80%. Tencent, which already owned directly…
We have been arguing for more than one year that video gaming assets could attract significant M&A interest from Tech and social media giants and Microsoft’s reported takeover talks with Activision today clearly confirm our view. The deal, if confirmed, would mark a major step-up in Microsoft’s gaming M&A strategy after its purchase of Bethesda…
If Facebook’s long-term strategy was not yet clear enough for everyone, its recent name change to Meta unambiguously states the company’s objective to be a major actor in the buildout of Internet’s upcoming (r)evolution, which premises are already starting to be visible through different angles. From the gaming industry’s perspective, the Web’s next iteration will…
Major video games are gradually turning into Metaverse destinations offering to their vast user base a wide range of activities well beyond gaming and including notably social interactions, entertainment and shopping in a 3D world. Roblox, our second largest portfolio company, clearly stands ahead of the pack when it comes to building a Metaverse, as…
Facebook made the headlines last week when it announced a rebranding to Meta, a strategic shift towards the Metaverse and massive investments over coming years to support its ambitions (starting with $10 billion in 2021). While the timing of these announcements could have much to do with an attempt to divert attention from recent bad…
There has been a lot of talk recently about the Metaverse, with notably Mark Zuckerberg commenting during Facebook’s latest earnings call that “we believe this is going to be the successor of the mobile Internet … In addition to being the next generation of the Internet, the Metaverse is also going to be the next…
Netflix’s long-awaited entrance into the video game market was “officialized” last week when news broke that the company had hired a gaming industry veteran, Mike Verdu, to lead the initiative. This is a natural move for Netflix, that needs to find new avenues of growth beyond an increasingly competitive video streaming market and that has…
A couple of weeks ago, we commented that the Augmented Reality (AR) theme was heating up with several major new games (Pikmin, the Witcher…) and devices (Snapchat spectacles) hitting the market and that AR glasses could take over smartphones as the new major gaming platform in a near future as they offer more immersive AR…
It’s already been 5 years since the Pokemon Go phenomenon brought Augmented Reality (AR) to the masses, with the game developed by Niantic (held by both Google and Nintendo) reaching more than 500 million users by the end of 2016 and still remaining at the top of app store downloads in 2021. Despite this initial…