2019 was a great year in video gaming. We saw cloud gaming take a leap forward, an increasingly competitive landscape around distribution, a healthy M&A environment, plenty of big game releases (Apex Legends, Call of Duty, etc) and much more. We’ve also seen the stigma around video gaming continue to dissipate, especially here in North America.
This industry now has over 2.6B gamers and is worth $152B, which is more than twice the size of Hollywood ($42B) and Music ($20B) combined. In 2018, consumers watched 52B hours of Netflix while YouTube Gaming alone had 50B hours watched. I expect that YouTube Gaming surpassed Netflix in 2019. This is no longer just about playing games. Video gaming is a key tenant of the future of digital entertainment via a two-way media experience.
Here at Konvoy, we made 9 investments in the “picks & shovels” of video gaming and esports in 2019. We’re thrilled to be investors alongside such great founders and other investors. We will continue to publish insight pieces as well as this weekly newsletter (all are here). Looking ahead, there are significant tailwinds for the video gaming industry, which is why we firmly believe that investing in the most innovative infrastructure companies of this space will pay off.
We look forward to all that’s ahead in 2020.
