How Does Game Industry Affect the Market?

In the past few years, M&A activities in the games industry have been overdriven, often reaching billions of dollars in scale. Many issuers have also begun to invest heavily in market segments or establish cooperative relationships with other companies.

Zynga, for example, bought Peak Games, publisher of mobile game in Turkey, for $1.8 billion. Bought a majority stake in Finland's Small Giant Games for another $560m. It also acquired Rollic Games and Gram Games, makers of ultra-casual mobile game, for $250 million and $168 million, respectively.

At the same time, mobile interactive entertainment company Scopely also completed the acquisitions of Disney's game studio FoxNext Games and Irish Digit Game Studios. Activision Blizzard cooperated with Tencent, jointly developed FPS mobile game Call of Duty: Mobile. Just one year after it went live, the total global revenue of Call of Duty in the App Store and Google Play has reached $480 million.

In this article, Sensor Tower will analyze the aforementioned transactions and other acquisitions to further understand the specific impact of these acquisitions on the mobile game market.

Sensor Tower will analyze the revenue and downloads of the top game categories in the U.S. market in the first 1-3 quarters of 2020 to understand the market share of major publishers. These data can not only show the performance of certain manufacturers in a specific sub-category market, but also show the impact of acquisition transactions on the market structure.

Puzzle Games

During the first 9 months of 2020, the British publisher--King became the leader in the American puzzle game market. Prior to this, Activision Blizzard spent $5.9 billion at the end of 2015 to complete the acquisition of King. Driven by the head product of Candy Crush Saga , King's total user spending increased by 6% year-on-year to approximately $ 846 million.