Apparently, the COVID-19 pandemic has been a godsend for the gaming industry. According to a report by InvestGame, which analyses market transactions in the game industry, total game deals hit $33.6 billion across 665 transactions in 2020. As icing on the top, mergers and acquisitions in the game industry topped a whopping $12.6 billion in value.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
If you include the announced yet unclosed deals such as the acquisition of Bethesda\u2019s parent company Zenimax by Microsoft for $7.5 billion, then the total value will stand to $22.2 billion. There were 219 mergers and acquisitions deals last year, including key players like Tencent, Embracer, Stillfront, and Zynga. The second-biggest acquisition deal belongs to Zynga, who bought Peak Games for $1.8 billion. Taking third place is Tencent which acquired Leyou for $1.3 billion, and Electronic Arts (EA) agreeing to buy Codemasters for $1.2 billion.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This makes 2020 the biggest year for M&A deals in the game industry since 2016, said the co-founder of Invest Game, Sergei Evodkimov. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
These numbers show that even though the pandemic is hurting many industries, the gaming industry remained quite unaffected. The reason is pretty simple-people turned to digital entertainment to escape from the horrible reality while being locked in their homes and forced to socialize at a distance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In the report, Invest Game also highlighted that the United States took the lead when it came to investing in the game industry last year, accounting to 36% of the total deal value, while China took second place at 27%.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Meanwhile, corporate and venture capital investments in the games industry also witnessed an upwards trend, with total deals valuing at $5.9 billion across 363 transactions. In terms of initial public offerings, there were 18 IPOs in 2020, valued at a total of $2.8 billion, though there were hardly any major IPOs during the first quarter of 2020 due to the pandemic. However, the pandemic did create a favorable market, or at least at the end of the year.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Surprisingly, the total value of IPOs reached $15.1 billion by the end of the year, mostly driven by the robust interest in games following future lockdown, extended work-from-homes initiatives, and social distancing measures.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Apparently, the COVID-19 pandemic has been a godsend for the gaming industry. According to a report by InvestGame, which analyses market transactions in the game industry, total game deals hit $33.6 billion across 665 transactions in 2020. As icing on the top, mergers and acquisitions in the game industry topped a whopping $12.6 billion in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":14,"featured_media":2742,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2],"tags":[158,378,377,258,382,61,32,383],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gamesround.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2737"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gamesround.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gamesround.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gamesround.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/14"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gamesround.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2737"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.gamesround.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2737\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4663,"href":"https:\/\/www.gamesround.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2737\/revisions\/4663"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gamesround.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2742"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gamesround.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2737"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gamesround.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2737"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gamesround.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2737"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}