Weekly Big News Collection

1.

The Value of games acquisitions this year reached $19.24 billion last month, according to a report from Buy Shares.

Overall, the total value is for 37 deals. Moreover, the top 10 transactions accounted for $17.68 billion.

Unsurprisingly, Microsoft’s acquisition of Fallout Creator Bethesda and its parent company ZeniMax Media ranked at No.1 with a staggering $7.5 billion.

Meanwhile, Zynga came at No.4 as it purchased Toon Blast developer Peak Games for $1.85 billion. Furthermore, the company acquired Turkish hypercasual specialist Rollic for $180 million.

2.

According to 36Kr, the VR game publisher Netvios, a joint venture established by NetEase Games and American VR content developer Survios, has been split from NetEase Games. The company’s founder Cao Anjie said that except for the domestic distribution of VR games by NetEase, Survios and other overseas R&D teams, Netvios also entered the e-sports system based on the VR music rhythm game “Beat Saber” this year.

“NetVios” is a joint venture established in China by NetEase and Survios, an American virtual reality game studio. Its main business is to distribute the world’s highest-quality virtual reality games in China, and to explore the business model of direct operation of experience stores. It uses traditional Internet platform and China’s new retail consumption to create online and offline dual-track parallel distribution channels.

3.

On December 7th, the League of Legends mobile game Taiwan server was officially launched

The game immediately reached the top of the free list and the fifth best-selling list within a day of its launch.

Riot’s general manager of Southeast Asia and Taiwan, Justin Hulog, revealed in accepting Taiwanese media Bahamut that in the future, the game plans to launch a unique hero character on the mobile terminal in “Wild Drift”.

In addition, Justin Hulog also stated that the version of “Wild Drift” has been developed over three or four years. More than 150 members have participated in the production of the game, and more fresh content will be added, such as the Battle Pass mechanism.  In addition, considering social factors, functions such as translation may be added to reduce the obstacles to international communication.

4.

According to Tianyancha.com, Dream Game Studio has undergone some shareholder changes recently with Linzhi Tencent Investment Management Co., Ltd.

Shanghai Dream Game Studio was established in December 2018. According to the information from Tianyancha.com, it is a company mainly engaged in game development and game outsourcing and independent game development.

5.

Shadowlands is the eighth expansion pack for Blizzard’s long-running MMO, and launched worldwide on November 23, 2020. 

The previous fastest selling PC title was Diablo III, another Blizzard release that managed to sell 3.5 million copies during its first day on shelves back in 2012.

6.

The top grossing mobile game worldwide for November 2020 was Honor of Kings from Tencent with $230.5 million in user spending, which represented 62.5 percent growth from November 2019. Approximately 96.4 percent of Honor of Kings’ revenue was from China, followed by 1.4 percent from Taiwan and 1 percent from Thailand. The full ranking of the top grossing mobile games for November 2020 is above. Game revenue estimates are from Sensor Tower’s Store Intelligence platform.

PUBG Mobile from Tencent was the second highest earning mobile game worldwide for November 2020 with more than $173.8 million in gross revenue, which represented 3.8 percent year-over-year growth from November 2019. About 54.2 percent of PUBG Mobile’s revenue was from China and its localized version of the title, Game For Peace, followed by 11.5 percent from the United States. The next top grossing mobile game was Genshin Impact from miHoYo, followed by Coin Master from Moon Active and Pokémon GO from Niantic.

Following its spectacular launch, blockbuster RPG Genshin Impact fell to the No. 3 grossing mobile game in November, generating $143 million. The majority of the title’s revenue for the month came from Japan, where players spent $38 million, or 26.6 percent of revenue. This was ahead of China, which ranked No. 2 for player spending with $36.3 million, or 25.4 percent. Outside of China, Google Play accumulated the lion’s share of Genshin Impact’s revenue last month, accounting for close to $65 million, or 60.7 percent of total player spending.

7. 

Recently, Gamma Data and Newzoo jointly released the “2020 Global Mobile Game Competitiveness Report”, which conducted a detailed study of the global mobile game market and the overall overseas development of Chinese game companies, and announced the top 20 Chinese companies in the global mobile game market.

The report shows:

• In 2020, the global mobile game market is expected to exceed US$86 billion, an increase of more than 25%.
• In 2020, the actual sales revenue of China’s self-developed mobile games in overseas market is expected to exceed 13 billion U.S. dollars, an increase of more than 48% (the final data will be on the China Game Industry Report in mid-December).
• In developed regions such as Britain, America, Germany, Japan and South Korea, Chinese games have grown rapidly for two consecutive years
• Tencent, NetEase, Century Huatong, Sanqi Mutual Entertainment, and Perfect World entered the global competitiveness list of Chinese mobile game companies

8.

Nintendo has sold 1.3 million Switch consoles in China this year.

According to Niko Partners, as reported by Bloomberg, the sales have been made through both legal and grey markets.

Furthermore, Nintendo’s flagship hardware has moved almost double the units of the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One combined, in the same period. To date, 3.95 million Switch consoles have been sold in China.

9.

The annual “Game Oscars” TGA awards were officially released on December 11, “The Last of Us 2” won 5 awards including the 2020 Game Awards.At the same time, “Genshin Impact”, which was shortlisted for the “Best Mobile Game” and “Best RPG Game”, but unfortunately failed.

10.

At 8 AM on December 10th, “Cyberpunk 2077” was officially unlocked on the Steam store. As of 19:00 of the same day, the highest number of simultaneous online users of this 298 yuan game has exceeded 1 million, second only to the peak of the day of “CSGO”. A total of nearly 20,000 players gave comments, and the favorable rate was 72%.