Matthew Karch, CEO of Florida-based video game studio Saber Interactive, is on a roll. The 50-year-old – crew cut and leaning forward via Zoom with a square jaw that makes him look like an action figure – has just overseen the release of online multiplayer horror shooter Evil Dead: The Game. Although met with enthusiastic, if not stellar, reviews on Metacritic, the game was a hit, topping the PlayStation 5 sales chart in the US. Importantly for Karch, Evil Dead: The Game is the first major title released by Saber Interactive since selling the 600-employee studio to Swedish video game conglomerate Embracer Group in February 2020. It was the perfect start for a company that perhaps needed to justify its purchase price of approximately $525 million.
Since signing the contract, Karch’s life has changed. Previously, the studio was simply trying to make ends meet, balancing the pressure on Triple-A varnish while “keeping the lights on.” Now, thanks to the buyout, Karch hardly has any worries. As part of the deal, he sits on Embracer’s board, and has gone from being acquired to a buyer with a “massive Rolodex” of targets, he boasts. Over the past two years, the CEO has backed Saber Interactive and, in turn, Embracer with a number of companies, including 4A Games, the studio behind the critically acclaimed Metro franchise. At dinner one night with his boss, Embracer CEO Lars Wingefors, Karch asked why they hadn’t bought the Metro developer. “Oh, they don’t want to sell,” he was told. Karch’s bullish response: “It’s on. … I will do it. I’ll get those guys to sell them.”
In a way, taking over a video game company (like any other) is this simple: Identify a target; put a large enough number in front of the right people; wait until they say yes, maybe after you offer them a slightly larger number. But over the past few years, this process has replicated itself in the video game industry faster and more profitably than at any other stage in its history. According to investment banking firm Drake Star, total deal value for 2021 was $85.4 billion across 1,159 deals. That total was surpassed in the first six months of 2022, when $107 billion changed hands in 651 transactions. Although the numbers have slowed in recent months (as has the industry as a whole), mergers and acquisitions (M&A) have dominated almost every aspect of gaming discourse: headlines; YouTube video content; conversations between studio owners; fan forum posts.
Karch, Saber Interactive and Embracer Group are at the center of this madness. In May 2022, Embracer capped off its current M&A spree by acquiring Crystal Dynamics, Eidos-Montréal and Square Enix Montreal, along with the Tomb Raider and Deus Ex IPs, plus more than 50 back-catalogue titles, all for the seemingly reduced sum of 300 million dollars. That same month, Take-Two Interactive completed its $12.7 billion acquisition of mobile gaming giant Zynga. Tencent, the Chinese conglomerate and maker of hits such as Honor of Kings and the mobile version of Call of Duty, has embarked on its own studio spending spree in recent years. So does Sony, which bought Destiny developer Bungie for $3.7 billion. Even Nintendo, which has traditionally been much quieter than its rivals, has bolstered its ranks with several studios. But the deal that took everyone by surprise, including those at the Federal Trade Commission, was Microsoft’s $69 billion acquisition of struggling Call of Duty maker Activision Blizzard.
The dial definitely seems to have shifted, as represented by the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it rewording of Take-Two’s annual report. In 2021, the publisher of the Grand Theft Auto and Red Dead Redemption franchises addressed the importance of “retaining and acquiring” talent. This year it was replaced to emphasize “acquisition and retention”.
Taken as a whole, these transactions represent a consolidation of the world’s largest developers and publishers, and point to an industry not only in financial flux, but undergoing profound changes in power, consumption, work practices, and even the form of video. the game itself. However, game consultant and Hit Points newsletter author Nathan Brown (whom I wrote for when he was editor of UK video game magazine Edge) cautions against treating these contracts as one homogenous block. “Microsoft is expansionist … [and] trying to build an overwhelming subscription service,” he explains via Zoom, referring to Game Pass. Sony, in contrast, plays things a little differently. Until the Bungie deal, its acquisition strategy was “protectionist”. Its purchases of other studios, such as Finnish developer Housemarque and remake specialist Bluepoint, were driven by an effort to maintain its market leadership.
Sweden’s Embracer and China’s Tencent’s near-voracious gobble includes everything from video game studios and publishers to comic book, anime and board game companies. Tencent, the world’s largest gaming company by revenue ($27 billion in 2021 total revenue), has been aggressively expanding its business in the West, partly in response to slowing growth opportunities in China due to the country’s strict entertainment regulations. According to Daniel Ahmad, senior analyst at Asian game market intelligence firm Niko Partners, Tencent has tripled its investment rate year-on-year over the past three years. In 2019, he invested in 10 game companies; in 2020, 32; and then, in 2021, the number exploded to 101. “Tencent wants, first and foremost, to become a global game developer and publisher,” Ahmad says. “Now more than 25 percent [of its revenue] comes from abroad.”
Embracer, formerly known as THQ Nordic and before that Nordic Games Licensing, went public on Nasdaq First North in 2016. Since then, it has rapidly increased its collection of companies in an attempt to mitigate the risks of game development while delivering returns for its shareholders. “If you can make one game, you have a big business risk,” Wingefors told the Financial Times. “But if you make 200 games, like we do, the business risk is lower.” This week, the company (which continues to raise money by selling shares) announced that its subsidiaries have more than 220 games in development. Despite posting a first-quarter net loss of $17 million, it spent several hundred million dollars acquiring several more companies, which turned into a meme, briefly leading to its Wikipedia page being vandalized, that Embracer had “acquired every company in existence .”
With every company jockeying for position, it’s no surprise that Jack Tretton, former CEO of Sony Computer Entertainment America and now head of Power Up, a special-purpose acquisition firm, calls M&A activity “constant.” He says it’s undoubtedly “heated up” in the last few years, partly because the games industry has had what can be described as a favorable pandemic. Although it has experienced challenges in game production and hardware production as a result of remote work and supply chain issues, industry revenues have increased and gaming has become mainstream like never before.
When I talk to Tretton via Zoom, he’s in hype mode. He excitedly points to investments coming in from the usual suspects: Sony, Microsoft, Tencent and Embracer, as well as what he believes is the relatively untapped potential of peripheral figures such as Amazon, Apple and even Samsung. (Netflix has tentatively dipped into gaming waters as well, buying Oxenfree developer Night School Studio and more.)
“If you’re a gamer, things are great, because tons of money is being pumped into [creating] new forms of entertainment,” says Tretton. “If you’re actively working in the space, there are really good signs that more and more money will continue to flow in the form of investment from large corporations who may want to commit more to the gaming space.” Ultimately, Tretton says, the current M&A mania is “good for everyone,” except, perhaps, for gamers who enjoy playing Activision Blizzard’s Call of Duty franchise on their Sony consoles. The fate of these giant multiplatform titles now hangs in the balance.
Mike Rose, founder of Manchester-based indie publisher No More Robots, agrees with Tretton’s characterization of M&A hysteria, though not necessarily his conclusion. In recent years, Rose has been contacted more than a dozen times about the sale. The numbers hanging in front of Rose, whose company is successful (his hits include Descenders and Hypnospace Outlaw), though nowhere near a household name, were “ridiculous,” he tells me via Zoom. And yet, by not selling, Rose is seemingly at odds with many of his peers. “I don’t know if I could let someone else own this thing that I made,” he admits. “You weigh the pros and cons, right? Advantages: Everyone gets rich. Cons: Let a company own this thing I made. I just don’t know how I would feel about that. I think the answer is that I would feel bad.”
Regardless of all the headlines these deals generate, as well as speculation among fans about which targets Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo, or even Tencent should be next, most of the gaming public has no idea what’s actually going into them. In an effort to bridge this gap and determine whether buying a video game company is as simple as one CEO opening the company’s checkbook in front of another, I set up a Zoom call with Keith Warner, CEO of New World Interactive (best known for the hardcore tactical shooter from the first faces of Insurgency: Sandstorm), to find out exactly how his company’s deal with Embracer happened.
In February 2020, Warner sought funding for New World Interactive’s as-yet-unreleased fourth game. Prior to that, the studio achieved a kind of stealth success, enjoying massive player numbers and millions in sales without attracting the attention of the mainstream gaming press. With such achievements, the appetite of the New World grew. “We had higher aspirations. We wanted to make a game that would take advantage of our experience,” says Warner. His team put together a pitch – not just for the game, but for the studio itself – and a list of potential targets to talk to via Zoom, due to the pandemic. Then they exercised their asses.
In late April, Warner and his team introduced themselves to Karch at Sabre. It wasn’t until the end of July (“the 11th hour,” he says dramatically) that he called. The news was positive, and the two teams traded valuations until a letter of intent was signed a few weeks later. That’s when, Warner says, the real work began: due diligence.
The CEO describes due diligence as when “the customer crawls under the covers and looks at absolutely everything… an undeniably brutal and emotional process that makes you feel like you didn’t do it right.” Depending on the complexity of the job and other factors such as the age of the company, this can take months. Warner, however, wanted to get it done quickly, so the companies embarked on a “super fast” two-week process. For 18 hours a day on Zoom, Warner, his corporate attorney and his CPA advisor met with Karch and more than 40 “crème de la crème” from the legal and business world. “I wanted to rip off the Band-Aid, go through it hard and fast,” Warner says. “I knew, well, I won’t sleep for two weeks, it’s going to be stressful as hell, but we won’t have much time to think and we can get back to making games.”
By mid-August, the deal (for an undisclosed sum) with Embracer was complete, meaning Warner could finally get out of the fundraising hamster wheel. He describes it as a “phenomenal relief”. The stress associated with keeping a company solvent, ensuring that at least six months of cash is always in the bank, disappeared overnight.
However, other studio executives, including those within Embracer, characterize the acquisition process differently. In September 2020, an email from Andrey Iones, co-founder of Saber Interactive, landed in Zen Studio CEO Mel Kirk’s inbox. Kirk and the executive team have been approached at least a dozen times in the recent past by investment firms, studios and publishers, but Sabre’s approach was “different,” he says. The two sides held Zoom meetings, discussing their “passions and what the future might look like.” Then, after just the second call, the offer was emailed. However, the talks did not end there. Wingefors, CEO of Embracer, chartered a private jet to pick up the COO and his colleagues in Budapest and fly them to the company’s headquarters in Karlstad, Sweden. “We thought it was really cool,” he says with a kind of jock enthusiasm. “[We felt] like the hot girl in the room.”
It’s easy to see why Embracer acquired New World Interactive, Zen Studios and Saber Interactive. With games like Insurgency: Sandstorm, New World Interactive has proven to be a skilled creator of online shooters, with small budgets compared to giants like Call of Duty. Saber Interactive has found success not only with similar online multiplayer titles, including Evil Dead: The Game and World War Z, but also through contract work on popular franchises such as Halo and Crysis. Zen Studio’s calling card is a series of well-received pinball games built on old IPs like Indiana Jones. This pairing of established IP with lucrative genres (ie, online titles that inspire hours of replay) seems central to Embracer’s strategy. With the recent news that Embracer has acquired Middle-earth Enterprises, the company that owns the intellectual property rights to most of the J.R.R. Tolkien’s most important works (including The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit), this looks set to continue in a more high-profile way than ever before.
The conglomerate’s voracious appetite for IP is best demonstrated by the creation of Karlstad’s massive video game archive. Embracer has framed this initiative as a public, educational good that preserves and honors gaming culture while connecting with museums, researchers and journalists seeking access to its already 50,000 collection of games, consoles and accessories. However, Professor Darren Wershler, who specializes in media history and media archaeology, does not see it so altruistically. “Embracer is in the business of intellectual property,” he told Vice. “They buy other companies as a way to secure valuable titles. Not just new, but ‘evergreen’ and forgotten titles. Building the archive will allow Embracer to efficiently research all historical game IPs to acquire and control potentially valuable but forgotten titles.”
Put it all together, and Embracer looks like the kind of modular video game corporation that’s seemingly well-positioned to navigate the content drain that may be looming for video games. Amid an overall decline in industry revenue, revenue from game subscription services such as Microsoft’s Game Pass and Sony’s PlayStation Plus increased; increasingly, these services are how players access their games. Their libraries require massive amounts of content, and Embracer, with its central database of well-remembered IP addresses, can provide it.
Indeed, just as video game subscription services seem to mirror TV and movie streaming platforms, so does the business rationale driving M&As. If the WarnerMedia-Discovery deal was about ensuring the survival of the two biggest companies in the so-called “Streaming Wars”, gaming companies can ensure their own survival (at least in the near future) by partnering with those bigger and stronger than them. The logic seems to be strength in numbers, although the downside may be a loss of autonomy for these formerly independent companies.
While Embracer publicly emphasizes the independence of its studios (Karch calls Embracer a “consolidator against consolidation”), it also emphasizes the “synergy” between them. Projects and data are shared; productivity is maximized. Karch puts it a little more informally: He’s all about “connecting the dots.”
At Tencent, the dots have remained disconnected until now, but there are signs that is changing. Not only is Tencent developing its own game engine for cloud games, but the company also recently announced its new publishing division, Level Infinite, and has since opened an office in Liverpool to oversee its international studies. You only have to take a quick look at the few titles that Level Infinite releases to see where Tencent believes the industry is headed. Nightingale is a fantastic online survival game; Warhammer 40,000: Darktide is a bloody online co-op shooter; Vampire: The Masquerade–Bloodhunt is a bloody free-to-play battle royale; Chimeraland is a bizarre open world survival and creation MMORPG.
This strategy seems to pair Triple-A console quality with game-as-a-service network structures, while integrating free-to-play monetization strategies. Tencent knows the latter better than most. Free-to-play is how the company reaps most of its massive gaming revenue in China, and is partly responsible for Fortnite’s stratospheric financial success (which came about after Tencent spent $330 million to buy roughly 40 percent of its developer , Epic Games, in 2013). Despite this financial success (and more than a few others, including the recently released Diablo Immortal), Pete Smith, vice president of partnerships for Tencent Games Global, believes that European and North American studios, often led by triple-A console veterans, are lagging behind their Chinese counterparts in terms of games as a service and free design. “That’s not a criticism,” he says. “We have some fantastic developers who know how to create incredible gaming experiences, premium games being great. So when we bring the two together, we can maximize the potential of what will be part of the future.”
Sony, a company that has previously staked its future on prestigious single-player games such as The Last of Us and Horizon Forbidden West, explicitly wants to get involved with this game-as-a-service. That’s why the company bought Bungie, developer of one of the most successful game-as-a-service franchises in recent years, the sci-fi space opera Destiny. From a technical and logistical standpoint, these are some of the most difficult games to make, requiring the delivery of dazzling high-fidelity visuals and fast-paced gameplay to millions of concurrent players, along with a story that unfolds not over the usual 20 or 30 hours, but over many months of incremental content. With this acquisition, Sony bought the talent and technology of arguably the best game-as-a-service studio in the world, while denying its biggest rivals access to the same resources.
While “traditional” (ie, single-player games) currently receive 88 percent of Sony’s investment, versus 12 percent for games-as-a-service, Sony intends to move that figure to 55 percent from 45 percent by mid-2025. (Sony’s This shift will contribute (March acquisition of Montreal-based studio Haven, which is currently developing a “Triple-A multiplayer experience.”) The death of the successful single-player video game has long been predicted and probably overstated, but the news that Sony, the purveyor of this type of game, is turning so sharply shared online experiences (including the expansion to esports) is undeniably significant.
The concern is that as businesses consolidate, so does the actual form of video games. The 2010s arguably represented a high-water mark for formal innovation, as indie titles like Firewatch and Papers, Please performed well commercially while pushing the boundaries of interactivity and storytelling. Indie game design sensibilities are arguably included in blockbuster releases like 2019’s Death Stranding, a big-budget expansion of the slow, exploratory underpinnings of the game genre known as walking simulators. The concern isn’t that experimental games won’t be made, at least for the foreseeable future, but that they might be drowned out by games-as-a-service titles, which increasingly resemble a homogenous block of screwball online heist-shooters. – about elements of survival and base building, and which occupy an increasing part of the player’s attention.
For such games, retention is key, and the reasoning is that endless and engaging online play, along with microtransactions, brings in more money than standalone play. Retention is also vital for subscription platforms whose rosters (especially Microsoft’s) are filled with the fruits of acquisition. While it’s hard to predict whether console subscription platforms will affect the form of video games, what’s already happened with Apple Arcade, Apple’s mobile game subscription service, could provide a clue. In 2020, Bloomberg reported that Apple was turning to “sticky” headlines, ie. headlines with high replay value that “better retain subscribers”. Grindstone, a puzzle-action game with more than 200 hours of content, was reportedly listed as the type of game Apple hoped to greenlight, one that keeps players engaged and renews their subscriptions. It has become the gold standard for video games whose success is determined by newly awarded retention and engagement metrics.
Piers Harding-Rolls, director of research at market data firm Ampere Analysis, believes excessive consolidation could affect the ability of smaller independent publishers and developers to compete in the long term. “We’re just at the starting point, and if there’s more consolidation of publishers to align with distribution and platforms, then the focus will be on first-party content,” he says via Zoom. “If you think about games that are going to attract people over a long period of time … then there’s going to be a shift towards those types of service-based games within subscription services. I think it relies more on larger companies than smaller entities that could develop smaller, shorter experiences.”
Yet while the context surrounding the current wave of consolidation is indeed new and the intensity of acquisitions unparalleled, the absorption of businesses by larger ones has long been a fixture of the video game industry. Famous Japanese publishers Square Enix and Bandai Namco were born out of exactly these circumstances. In the mid-2000s, as Microsoft looked to strengthen Xbox’s position in the console market, it bought studios like Lionhead, which it felt could deliver first-party titles to rival Sony’s. Electronic Arts also went through its own spending spree at the same time, including companies like Criterion Games, makers of the hugely popular Burnout and Need for Speed series in the 2000s.
Those involved in this consolidation process, including Tencent Games Global Chief Strategy Officer Eddie Chan, say consolidation is “natural”, simply part of the “ebb and flow” of the industry. Selling a studio can often make employees a healthy bundle of cash. Depending on their position, length of employment and negotiating ability, employees will often earn stock options. When one company is sold to another, the staff will have the ability to sell. If they choose to do so, potentially making a lot of money in the process, they have more options. Some will decide to quit, sailing off into the sunset of early retirement, while others will turn capital into a new studio—one that’s smaller, nimbler, and theoretically more innovative than the one they were previously employed by.
“[Consolidation] doesn’t mean the end of independent developers,” says Chan. “On the contrary, I think this actually creates a whole cycle of the next generation of game studios. People naturally look up and say, ‘It’s a good time to start my own thing.’ That’s the entrepreneurial environment out there and it’s never been easier.”
For all of Chan’s unsurprising optimism, the history of video game consolidation is also littered with the corpses of failed studios, some of which even produced supposed hits for their parent companies. Lionhead, creator of the Fable RPG franchise, was unceremoniously shut down by Microsoft in 2016; Pandemic, which seemingly made money for EA with its Star Wars: Battlefront games, was liquidated in 2009 after the underwhelming reception of the stealth adventure The Saboteur. For the people and families directly affected by these layoffs, some of whom will be moving hundreds if not thousands of miles for work, it’s hard to imagine seeing anything “natural” in such potentially avoidable studio closings.
However, Brown believes that the attitudes of the companies taking over this time are different and that the companies being bought are valued “for what they are good at, not what they could be forced to do, and therefore could fail”. He cites what happened at Rare as a particularly egregious example. The prominent developer of acclaimed games including GoldenEye 007, Banjo-Kazooie and Perfect Dark was acquired by Microsoft in 2002 for $375 million, only to be put to work creating avatars for its new owner’s Xbox Live service. “I don’t foresee that same level of creative control being taken away [from the studios], mandates coming down from on high, not working, and then the studio paying the price,” says Brown. “I’d like to think those days are behind us.”
Ahmad explains that the “hands-off” approach is essential to Tencent’s current strategy. “They don’t rebrand the companies they invest in when it’s a majority stake,” he says. “They are investing in the company knowing that it will operate independently and be able to continue the excellence that made them attractive to Tencent.”
Chan is pragmatic about the possibility of a Tencent game falling short of expectations: “Sure, it’s bound to happen, right? What I would say is that we try to be long-term focused. We don’t manage the next quarter or the next year. We are on a time horizon of more than five years. From that perspective, I think we have the ability to be more patient.” Chan says Tencent will continue to support the studio through its “ups and downs,” citing, somewhat confusingly, the fortunes of Epic Games, a company that failed to make money after Tencent’s investment in 2012. “We were very supportive of them for a long time before they Fortnite came along and the bet paid off,” says Chan. “We will continue to support and encourage a studio we believe in as long as our initial thesis of why we got involved with them remains true.”
Even so, if a studio falls short of Tencent’s expectations, the burden of responsibility ultimately falls on the studio itself. “It is our responsibility as leaders to make the right decisions to support our studies, which then support the livelihoods of their people,” says Chan. “But at the same time, we give a lot of autonomy to the studios. We are not the ones making operational decisions. … Decisions are mostly made by the studios themselves.”
Since I spoke with Chan, Bloomberg has reported that Tencent has lost $560 billion in market value, with the misery set to continue as a result of its first quarterly decline in revenue since the 2008 financial crisis. There’s no evidence yet of how the company’s current financial woes will affect its international game studios, but the news could at least give pause to those who recently signed with Tencent. The Chinese giant may not be quite as bulletproof as it once seemed.
Only time will tell how such consolidation will ultimately affect employment and work. It is clear, however, that the arguments about it will be full. On the one hand, there are trade unions and workers’ collectives, such as ABK Radnički savez, for whom conglomeration represents a tangible threat. “My skills and experience are quite specialized,” said Brice Arnold, a design researcher at Activision Blizzard, at a hearing held by the Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Justice to investigate Microsoft’s purchase of Activision Blizzard. “Given the ongoing consolidation in the video game industry, there are fewer potential employers for my specialized skills.”
Arnold’s concern is shared by Sara Steffens, secretary-treasurer of the Communications Workers of America, the largest communications and media union in the United States. “Mergers can exacerbate the problem of corporate dominance over workers,” she says. “They can lead to lower wages because fewer companies are competing for workers. There are restrictive covenants such as non-competes, non-disclosure agreements and mandatory arbitration agreements. Potentially, it exacerbates the problem of workers not getting a fair shake.”
This is largely the same argument used by the Department of Justice in its lawsuit against Penguin Random House, which is trying to consolidate the book industry by acquiring competitor Simon & $2.18 billion; Schuster. With one publisher competing less for their books, authors could theoretically get paid less. This represents a shift in thinking from how M&A might affect consumers, as it has in the past, to the leverage these companies have over workers, in this case authors.
On the opposite side are employers, CEOs and the consolidators themselves. When I present the concerns of Steffens and Arnold to Karch, he launches into a lengthy speech, reminiscent of Chan’s, about how the influx of investment only increases the opportunities within the industry, and thus the prospects of its workers. He agrees that “consolidation brings challenges,” but seems content with existing mechanisms (such as the FTC) to limit its disruptive effects on the market. He is open, as is his legal obligation, to enter into negotiations with the union if his employees decide to unionize, although he would be “surprised” if they do because “we treat our people very, very well.” According to Karch, Embracer is “a big company, but we act like a small company. … [We are] a collective of independent developers united around the common cause of growth.”
The question is whether Embracer, which just signed a $1 billion investment deal with a government-backed gaming group, will live up to its name. Karch certainly projects an image of a friendly embrace of both companies and their workers. Still, in the long run – through IP sharing and synergistic strategies, the “connect the dots” approach mentioned by Karch – it may prove to be closer to a Borg-like assimilation, each studio (and each worker) appreciates only in terms of how it increases the Embracer collective in the whole.
For workers seeking greater protection from Embracer’s commitment to growth, the signs emerging from Microsoft following the Activision Blizzard deal are encouraging. During a May meeting with Xbox Game Studios employees, Xbox boss Phil Spencer said he would recognize Raven Software’s union. This happened shortly after the QA testers at Raven voted to form the first union at a major studio. Spencer said he didn’t have much prior experience with unions, but that he and Linda Norman, deputy general counsel for the Xbox group, spent “a lot of time” getting educated. “We absolutely support the rights of employees to organize and form unions,” Spencer said. In all likelihood, Spencer and Microsoft will be forced to enter into negotiations with further unions; in July, a team of 20 employees at Blizzard Albany filed for a union election with the National Labor Relations Board. “We strive to foster work environments where we are respected and compensated for our essential role in the development process,” the team said in a statement.
Last month, headlines hit mainstream and gaming outlets that the industry was set to contract for the first time since 2015: It would go into recession. That forecast, by Ampere, suggests the contraction will be 1.6 percent – likely a negligible setback in light of the 26 percent growth from 2019 to 2021, but a contraction nonetheless. “The notion that the gaming market is ‘recession-proof’ is a fallacy,” Ampere’s report said, alluding to a widespread perception of the industry since it staved off recession after the financial crisis in 2008. In line with this downturn, M&A has slowed. Now may be a good time to take stock, an opportunity for consolidators to consolidate their newly bloated portfolios and bide their time before making even more intense purchases.
Or maybe not. According to Ampere’s Harding-Rolls, the recent wave of M&As has been driven in part by access to cheap money. “Raising cash has been incredibly cheap,” he explains via Zoom, referring to the lowest interest rates in years. “So it gave [acquiring companies] a war chest to do this kind of acquisition activity.” Although Harding-Rolls believes we could see another giant merger in 2022 (with the ailing Ubisoft long rumored as a potential takeover), the current economic situation has complicated the picture. “With interest rates rising in most advanced economies, I think that could affect continued access to cheap capital,” he says. It could also be the case that companies are simply a little more “risk-averse” now that the industry itself is in the midst of what has been described elsewhere as a “post-pandemic slump.”
If the latest wave of consolidation has indeed come to an end, how has it changed the global video game map? According to Daniel James Joseph, Manchester Metropolitan University’s senior lecturer in the political economy of digital culture, the answer is not much. He describes mergers and acquisitions as a “rearrangement of existing industries and their structure” rather than a turnaround or wholesale expansion. One big exception, Joseph says, is the introduction of Chinese companies such as Tencent and NetEase into the global market. But even their international investments were limited mainly to Global North companies that, he says, “still produce content for the Global North.”
What is beyond doubt, Brown notes, is that there has never been more scrutiny of video game M&As, whether by journalists, players or regulators. “Frankly, it’s getting a lot more attention,” he says. “We’re all just extremely online, extremely aware.” In a sense, the current wave of deals is a defining moment for the video game industry, exposing its corporate machinations in greater relief than ever. These agreements set the stage for at least the next decade, a time when video games will occupy a more prominent place in our cultural lives than ever before.
The stakes, then, have probably never been higher, and for Brown this raises a serious question: “Given the way our world is set up right now, how do we feel about concentrating power overwhelmingly in the hands of yet another small number of corporations? ”
Lewis Gordon is a Glasgow-based writer and journalist who contributes to media outlets including The Verge, Wired and Vulture.
What is the richest game ever?
| Rank | Franchise | Year of creation |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Pokemon | in 1996 |
| 2 | Mario | in 1981 |
| 3 | Call of duty | in 2003 |
| 4 | Wii | in 2006 |
What is the richest online game in the world? The top mobile game is Honor of Kings (2015), also known internationally as Arena of Valor, a multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) game published by Tencent that has earned more than $13 billion in lifetime revenue.
Why is PS5 so hard?
If you’re wondering why the PS5 is so hard to get hold of for us non-celebs, in short, it’s because of the pandemic-induced global chip shortage — and increased demand for entertainment technology for those stuck at home for the better part of two years. To see also : Google reportedly offered to focus its ad business on the new Alphabet segment to avoid litigation.
Why is the PS5 so hard to get in 2022? There is a perennial global shortage of semiconductors. Because the PS5 uses them, and because they’re really hard to come by these days, production of the PS5 has slowed down. And that’s not likely to change anytime soon, as experts predict the shortage will last until 2023.
Will getting a PS5 get easier?
The company is predicting PS5 sales of 18 million this fiscal year, which is up dramatically, and this could mean that supply issues are improving. This may interest you : The 10 most iconic pacifist video games. If you’ve been looking for a PlayStation 5 but haven’t been able to get one, 2022 could be your year.
Is PS5 hard to get now?
Due to chip shortages across all types of hardware, getting a PS5 isn’t as easy now as it was in 2020. On the same subject : Business People: Blue Cross and Blue Shield announce executive appointments. However, Sony expects chip shortages to ease by 2023, which will hopefully lead to more PS5 inventory at retailers around the world .
Why is PS5 digital so hard?
Here’s why the PS5 Digital Edition is hard to find. PlayStation CEO Jim Ryan discussed supply and demand issues with AV Watch. The interview was translated by VGC, and Ryan said: “The relationship between the digital edition and the disc model is currently something we cannot disclose at this time.
Who owns fortnite now?
Epic Games, Inc.
Who owns Fortnite? Tim Sweeney is co-founder and CEO of Cary, North Carolina-based game developer Epic Games. The private company is the maker of Fortnite, one of the most popular games in the world, with over 400 million players.
Does EA own Fortnite?
Epic Games owns Fortnite; Tim Sweeney, co-founder and CEO is the largest shareholder, with more than 50% of the company. And Tencent with a share of over 40% of the company. Epic Games develops, publishes and distributes games.
Who is the CEO of Fortnite?
Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney finally reveals his inspiration behind the development of Fortnite. Fortnite is one of the world’s biggest Battle Royales, with over 400 million players.
How much is Fortnite worth today?
Fortnite revenue Fortnite generated revenue of $5.8 billion in 2021, surpassing the previous annual record of $5.4 billion in 2018.
Is Ubisoft a billion dollar company?
Ubisoft: $7 billion market cap.
What is the net worth of UbiSoft? How much a company is worth is usually represented by its market capitalization, or the current share price multiplied by the number of shares outstanding. UbiSoft Entertainment’s net worth as of August 17, 2022 is $5.81 billion.
Is UbiSoft the biggest company?
Sony Group Corporation Sony remains the largest video game company in the world in 2022.
How much is UbiSoft Montreal Worth?
Takeover attempt by Vivendi (2015–2018) Along with advertising firm Havas, Ubisoft was one of the first target properties identified by Vivendi, valued at $6.4 billion as of September 2017.
