Wow, just wow! What a week has it been for gaming! If you like to see news about billions of dollars, you’re in the right place – this is Industry Intel, EarlyGame’s weekly recap of the video game business. Let’s go!
Tencent Puts €30 Million in Dotnod
Dotnod, the developers of Life is Strange and Tell Me Why announced that they are raising €40 million towards a new publishing effort (that’s about $48.5 million) and who should oblige but the friendly local Chinese mega-giant Tencent. I mean hey, we hadn’t reported a big Tencent investment in a few months now, so it was about time. All jokes aside, this is actually a minor stake in Dotnod, but the fact that Tencent has been acquiring companies from pretty much every genre and niche only indicated that they are playing the long game and slowly but methodically taking over the industry.
Game Pass Now Has 18 Million Subscribers
Xbox’s unorthodox business plan seems to be working already. The launch of their latest hardware offerings, the Xbox Series X and S have attracted many new users to their Game Pass program - officially 18 million now, paying $10 per month. This is a service similar to music and movie streaming subscriptions and as it turns out, many people are perfectly happy consuming content with a monthly subscription price tag instead of straight-up owning the media. We are curious to see what levels of profitability Microsoft will get out of this in the future.
Star Wars Battlefront II With 19 Million Downloads
We told you how to get Battlefront II for free and of course, very many of you did! The overall download count on the Epic Games Store reached 19 million, causing servers to crash. Despite the hiccups, gamers are enjoying the title - many reliving the multiplayer thrill, and even more experiencing it for the first time.
In other Star Wars news, there’s been whispering of a new Knights of the Old Republic in development. The internet rumor machine says the new RPG is in the hands of a surprise studio that’s not in any way connected to EA. Could this be true?
MegaDev Raises $1.9 Million For Cheats
Plitch is a new trainer platform supporting 2,600 titles, promising to bring a premium cheat experience for single-player games. Crazy, right? For a subscription fee of $4.99 a month, this app promises time-saving workarounds, but also make games harder if you’re into that sort of thing. The appeal here is that your cheats would come from a reputable source and not a shady ZIP file downloaded from a dodgy cloud. This might mean new life for video game cheats - something that used to be commonplace in the past, not to mention free.
GameStop Stonks
And finally, the biggest news. You’ve probably been seeing headlines and memes about this all week, but here’s just a quick recap - in history’s first epic fight of professional investors versus meme lords with smartphones, Wall Street bigshots attempted to “short” GameStop stocks and make a quick buck off of what they thought was a dying business. Reddit and Discord users said “screw that” and coordinated a massive option buying campaign, ultimately inflating GameStop’s stock price by hundreds of percent in the course of a few days, and a LOT of money was made and lost. Hedge funds have lost upwards of 6 billion (yes, with a B) as of the writing of this Industry Intel, and the numbers change by the hour. What a time to be alive!
Come back in exactly a week for another Industry Intel! For more industry news and video game information, keep reading EarlyGame!
