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I’m spending some time getting back up to speed on the major players in the games sector as part of my increased involvement in Hiro Capital, and this chart in the Activision Blizzard annual report leaped out at me: Microsoft was less than 10% of Activision Blizzard’s revenue. Sony was more, and the two main...

I’ve recently been asked to think about what rising inflation (8.2% in the UK in June; 9.1% over the last 12 months in the US) means for the video game industry. There are three areas to think about: the impact on prices the impact on costs the effect of the wider political and economic situation...

I just saw a chart from Martin Nerurkar about the sales of his game Nowhere Prophet by platform. He followed up with this tweet: And if you’re wondering why the Microsoft Store isn’t on this graph, that’s because we haven’t made a single sale there in this entire time.— Martin making 💚 GOBLIN ERRANDS 💚...

Sony’s recent corporate presentation was heavily focused on F2P and live-service games. Piers Harding-Rolls has an excellent analysis thread on Twitter, and these 2 charts leaped out at me. That chart shows that more a quarter of PS4 revenue is now from F2P games: live service games from third party publishers that are keeping the...

Cryptocurrencies, the blockchain, NFTs and pay-to-earn: 4 separate growth areas that promoters and shysters conflate, to the detriment of us all. The crypto/blockchain/NFT bubble continues apace. Compared to the dot com bubble that burst in 2000, it seems as if this bubble is inflating faster and bigger, driven not just by the promise of the...

I am continuing my quest to understand this third major transition in the technology / games markets in my career (first: the Internet; second: free-to-play; now: the blockchain). I feared that I didn’t or couldn’t understand. Spending time at the Develop conference helped me a lot. I had feared I was no longer smart. I’ve...

Twice in my career, I have been at the forefront of massive change. In 2000, I was an Internet analyst at Deutsche Bank advising middle-aged men (and they were all men) on how this new nerdy Internet thing was going to change the world. It was three months before the dotcom crash. Valuations were stratospheric....

Many games companies struggle with how to use their metrics and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) effectively. They are conflicted because game metrics have two different purposes: Comparison and Improvement. Improvement I use metrics to help games companies make better games. My aim is not to compare one games company to another to see which one...

UK trade body UKIE has put out an infographic capturing the size of the UK games market and pegs it at £7 billion in 2020. Looking at the infographic, several points stand out: Digital console software at £1.7 billion remains the largest single market, edging out mobile which has £1.5 billion. Digital console grew more...

Last week, we announced that I had joined Hiro Capital as a Venture Specialist. Hiro is one of a new breed of games investor targeting the “post-Seed gap”, helping companies in the games and related technology/wearables sectors with Series A and Series B funding. As Ian Livingstone, one of the co-founders of the fund put...