Fidele winners: These video games are also big hits as stocks!

A It will be an unusual Christmas for gamers too. Popular game consoles like the Playstation 5 (PS5) from Sony , Microsoft’s Xbox and Nintendos Switches are difficult to come by because of the ongoing supply bottlenecks for chips. And with blockbuster games there are no big hits in sight until the end of the year. Nevertheless, the enthusiasm of the fans for the consoles and for upgraded gamer PCs with lightning-fast graphics cards from NVIDIA and AMD , the most expensive components in the Game computers, not to slow down. The market researcher Newzoo, which specializes in the video game industry, expects average growth of almost nine percent to total revenues of $ 219 billion in 2024 for 2021 and the following years.

An on the stock market, delays in the development of new versions of blockbuster games or weaker launches of current versions such as “Call of Duty Vanguard” are currently holding back the price imagination of the stocks of large game developers such as Activision Blizzard , Electronic Arts , Take-Two Interactive and Ubisoft . Long-term investors, however, pay attention to the favorable valuation of the sector. An indication of this is the comparison of the Global Videogames Peer Group of the US stock exchange service Bloomberg with the NASDAQ Composite -Index. The average P / E of gaming stocks for the upcoming fiscal year is a third lower than the valuation of the broad US technology index. The courage to invest now could prove to be a Christmas present later. The prospects for the industry are good thanks to the game boom on mobile devices and new, additional markets.

Additional booster cinema and streaming

Because both Playstation developers Sony and the giants in the streaming business Amazon and Netflix identified a new growth market: the filming of popular games for cinemas and the stream for the screens at home. Numerous premieres are in the works for the coming year: films with real actors and cartoon-like anime versions that are particularly popular in Asia. The streaming stage, which will later also be used for cinema versions of blockbuster games, is significantly wider than the world’s largest video game platform, Stream. It is estimated that 120 million gamers play on Stream. Streaming leader Netflix and number 2 Amazon Prime, on the other hand, each have more than 200 million subscribers.

Netflix is ​​also at the start

Sony filmed its own adventure game “Unchartered”, in German “Unchartered”, with a star cast in its studios in Hollywood brings it to the big screens on February 20th. Tom Holland from “Spider Man: No way home” plays treasure hunter Nathan Drake, Mark Wahlberg from “Transfomers 5: The last Knight” plays Victor “Sully” Sullivan, Drake’s rival and later partner in the treasure hunt.

The job for the filming of Sony’s popular game “The Last of Us”, which is also due to hit cinemas next year, was taken over by “Game of Thrones “developer HBO. According to Sony, ten projects for films and series from computer games are in the works.

Meanwhile, the Japanese rival Nintendo is filming the adventures of “Super Mario” and his friends, characters in the anime genre that are popular around the world. Streaming prime Netflix behaves in a similar way, using several game developers in the portfolio for its anime debuts next year. With the Japanese developer Square Enix of “Tomb Raider”, with the Polish game studio CD Projekt with the popular “Cyberpunk 2077” and finally with Europe’s largest game developer Ubisoft. For the French, Netflix chose “Assassin’s Creed”, “Far Cry” and “Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell”. “Assassin’s Creed” is about the adventures of the bartender Desmond Miles, who is kidnapped by a Templar organization at the beginning. There will also be a film parallel to the anime version. The game provides enough material for a streaming series, which can be continued if it is successful.

Netflix opens up new perspectives for game developers in several areas and has also been offering computer games in its app version for Google’s Android operating system since November. Tech giant Apple refuses to All-one gaming apps previously gave access to its online store. Not only Netflix, also Microsoft’s Xbox Cloud Gaming, Nvidia’s GeForce Now and Google Stadia must stay outside. With the popularity of cloud gaming, Apple’s Refusal to become a case for the antitrust authorities.

Online games are the preliminary stage for cloud gaming. The console kings Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo have to penetrate this segment in good time before lateral entrants such as Alphabet, Amazon and Netflix. According to information from Bloomberg experts, Sony is preparing a game pass for online gaming with the “Spartacus” project. The Japanese want to use their large platform with 116 million Internet-enabled PS4 consoles, which will be expanded with the new PS5, to catch up with Microsoft. More than 18 million already use the Xbox developer’s Game Pass and pay ten to 15 dollars a month for unlimited access to over 100 games, a lucrative business for the group. Microsoft’s streaming service for gamers xCloud has been available since this year.

Cloud gaming is currently not really relevant in business. According to Bloomberg estimates, however, with more than 45 million users worldwide, it could generate more than eleven billion dollars in revenue in 2030. The experts estimate that large game developers, as well as Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo, who have considerable developer resources for games, could earn up to a billion dollars each year via the cloud.

Nintendo launched its online services in 2018 and is available with many of its popular games such as “Super Mario”, “Zelda” or “Animal Crossing New Horizons” for the Transition to the cloud prepared. The Pro version of the Switch console with new technology, which fans have longed for in 2021, is still a long time coming. There are still no signals from Nintendo in this regard. After all, the popular Switch console could exceed the mark of 100 million units sold since its launch in 2017 by the end of March, soon surpassing the previous Wii’s record of 101.6 million consoles. Nintendo fans mostly resist the temptations of the competition stubbornly, but now they too want state-of-the-art hardware. Switch sales are declining for the first time since the console was introduced.

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