🕹Why you should invest in Video Games Publishers and the Gaming Industry ! 🕹

Epic’s PC game store is live now

• Within the span of a week, Epic Games, the developer of the popular battle royale Fortnite, announced and subsequently launched their own digital game store. Chinese Esports giant Tencent holds a large stake in Epic Games.

• This places Epic in direct competition with Valve’s industry-leading games platform Steam – a battle Epic hopes to win by offering significantly lower revenue split fees (12% vs Steam’s 30%) and waiving its 5% royalty fee for all games made using its Unreal Engine.

• The store will initially focus on indie titles and has currently confirmed 14 titles, two of which are high profile games.

Comments

• Epic’s store is one of the most significant attempts in the last years to challenge Steam’s dominant position in the digital game store space.

• This is less because of the cuts to fees – which will surely be attractive to particularity smaller developers – but mostly because Epic’s store is embedded in their game launcher which is already on countless computers due to Epic’s free-to-play offering of Fortnite. The launch is also very well timed given Steam’s recent faux-pas on lowering its 30% fees to 25%, but only for big games with more than USD10m in sales.

• As a result, we think Epic has a good chance to carve out a space in the game distribution market. However, to achieve this Epic will not only have to convince developers to join their platform, but also create a compelling enough offer to convince players to further fragment their game libraries – which is the real challenge in my view.

Does cloud computing mean game over for Xbox and PlayStation?

• Cloud gaming describes a currently (mostly) theoretical concept in which gamers with strong enough internet connections could stream (instead of download) high-end games and play them over the web on any device.

• This has huge disruptive implications for the console market as consoles could be rendered irrelevant and ultimately companies such as Netflix, Amazon, or Hulu could expand their offering to games.

• Successful experiments conducted by Nintendo and Ubisoft in Japan signal that streaming services are poised to expand. However, slow internet speeds and content-heavy triple A titles are likely to extend the life of consoles, which have absorbed years of threats of rival technologies.

Conclusion

Overall, both of these news are VERY positive for the game Publishers such as Ubisoft, EA, Activision or Take Two.

I think they are an investment no-brainer for the long-term because:

• Thanks to this new competition, they will have more bargaining power and less intermediaries (Steem or Sony/Nintendo…)

• Digital enhance their margins because of the lower borrowing costs and the increasing spending amounts in games

• Emerging Markets such as China have shown that billions of new players will come in the future and are ready to spend a lot of $$$

• The development of eSport is a very positive one as videogames will have an entirely new ecosystem (Advertising, eSportsmen, stadiums, teams…)

Sources:

• https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/6/18126139/epic-store-games-pc-ashen-hades-game-awards-2018
• https://www.ft.com/content/0a46b2ac-f70a-11e8-af46-2022a0b02a6c

You don't want to miss a Crypto news?

Follow me on Twitter or Facebook

Join SteemFollower and get Upvotes back !

Published on

"
by Mr Crypto Lemon