TGO Daily | January 8, 2021 | SuperData 2020 Report
January 8, 2021
My apologies for the missing newsletter yesterday — I took the day off for a variety of reasons! Don’t worry, you didn’t miss much.
Today is big on industry news! Hope you find it interesting :)
Until tomorrow,
Adrian
In The News
SuperData Report
SuperData released their annual report reflecting on the year in video games. SuperData collects market data about digital games worldwide. I won’t go over everything, so feel free to read the full report yourself, but here’s some interesting factoids.
Overall, the gaming industry earned $139 billion dollars in 2020, which is up 12% year over year, thanks to the pandemic increasing interest in games overall. Free-to-play games generated 78% of that revenue, and Asian markets took 59% of those free-to-play earnings.
Mobile games still earn more money than any other gaming format, especially in the free-to-play world. The top 8 out of 10 free-to-play games are mobile titles. One of those games is League of Legends, which is now 11 years old. Another title which performed very well was Roblox, surpassing Fortnite — we’ll talk more about them in a sec.
In terms of premium games, here’s the chart they give:
3 of those games are sports titles, which saw a surge as real sports were taken off television, and continued the momentum when live sports returned. All the other titles are perhaps expected, though it still amazes me how well GTA performs.
Virtual reality games earned 25% more year-over-year, thanks to the release Half-Life: Alyx, with hardware up 19% thanks to the Oculus Quest 2.
Roblox Going Public
We’ve known for a while now that the Roblox Corporation was planning on become a public company on the stock market. We’ve recently learned that they went through another round of funding, raising $520 million and bringing the company valuation to $29.5 billion.
For context, this makes Roblox a bigger company than many other industry giants like Epic Games and Take-Two Interactive. Early last year, they were valued at “only” $4 billion, so they made some good moves in prep to go public.
They have also decided to go public through a direct listing rather than IPO. I won’t pretend to know what that means in a broader context, but those of you who trade stocks presumably will. Either way, it’s pretty interesting to see how large the company has grown, and all relatively under the radar.
Monster Hunter Rise
Nintendo has released a limited-time demo for Monster Hunter Rise, which is releasing on March 26th. If you’re itching to get your hands on the game, feel free to give it a shot. It’ll feature the new grappling hook and the monsters you’re able to ride like horses. It also has two monster hunts to go on, which can be played solo or co-op. They removing the demo at the end of the month though, so play it soon!
If you didn’t know, Rise is considered the next entry in the main series. Interestingly though, they’re releasing it exclusively on the Nintendo Switch. Considering Monster Hunter: World is Capcom’s best selling game of all time (by a wide margin), I’m not sure why they limited themselves with the next main entry. If you have more clarity on this situation than I do, I’d be happy to get updated information.
Microsoft Tries to Buy
Because today is slow for news, I wanted to share a funny story which is making the rounds. The headline is that Microsoft tried to buy Nintendo 20 years ago, “but they just laughed their asses off.” For the anecdote in better words than mine, here’s the lengthy Bloomberg article. Here’s a collection of quotes:
“Steve made us go meet with Nintendo to see if they would consider being acquired. They just laughed their asses off. Like, imagine an hour of somebody just laughing at you. That was kind of how that meeting went.”
“We actually had Nintendo in our building in January 2000 to work through the details of a joint venture where we gave them all the technical specs of the Xbox. The pitch was their hardware stunk, and compared to Sony PlayStation, it did. So the idea was, “Listen, you’re much better at the game portions of it with Mario and all that stuff. Why don’t you let us take care of the hardware?” But it didn’t work out.”
They also took a stab at Square:
We had a letter of intent to buy Square. In early November 1999, we went to Japan. We had one of those big dinners with their CEO and Steve Ballmer. The next day, we’re sitting in their boardroom, and they said, “Our banker would like to make a statement.” And basically, the banker said, “Square cannot go through with this deal because the price is too low.” We packed up, we went home, and that was the end of Square.
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