Industry Report: Is the Gaming Industry Going to Boom?

Gaming has become more popular than ever but is this also reflected in gaming startups’ funding? Let’s find out.

Funderbeam
Funderbeam Wire
Published in
3 min readMay 4, 2018

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Games are being played by millions of people every day on their computer, mobile phones, and consoles. Exasperating the point, at least 3.2 million people have been concurrently playing the massively popular multiplayer shooter game Fortnite, developed by Epic Games. And that is just one game out of tens of thousands.

But is the popularity of gaming being reflected in the funding data of gaming industry startups?

Gaming startups’ funding more than doubled in 2017

Gaming industry funding peaked in 2017 and the number of rounds peaked two years before that.

The funding of gaming industry startups has been under $1bn until 2017, where it reached an all-time high of $2.3bn.

The top contributors to this were Sea Limited, an online game platform from Singapore raising $550m, and Improbable, a platform for creating virtual worlds from the UK raising $502m.

With such increase in funding in 2017 compared to previous years, will 2018 exceed that? Will the gaming industry continue its growth or was last year’s boom just a one-off? Based on the data so far, it could go both ways.

Asia outperforms all regions in 2017

For years, North America has been the region with the most funding in the industry. Until 2017, where Asia and Europe outperformed it.

Asia took a huge jump in gaming industry funding in 2017 reaching $1bn, the all-time highest out of all regions.

Asia’s funding was almost double of what it was in North America that year. Out of the $1.02bn in industry funding in Asia, $550m was raised by aforementioned Sea Limited.

Gaming startups in North America have received less and less funding over the years after the peak in 2015. That’s the year when FanDuel, a fantasy sports platform, raised $275m.

The United States is the leading country in gaming industry funding

The United States is the country with the most funding, almost $2.7bn, going to gaming startups.

Although the funding of gaming related startups in North America has been declining since 2015, the United States is still the leading country when it comes to total industry funding since 2013. But that $2.7bn the US gaming startups have received, is just 0,8% of the country’s overall funding.

In contrary, Singapore has $730m in industry funding which means almost 7% of the country’s total funding is going to the gaming industry.

The gaming industry is definitely one to keep an eye on.

Fun fact: Not only do fans enjoy playing games, they enjoy watching other people play as well. Coming back to the game Fortnite (Epic Games), last month, fans spent over 128 million hours on Twitch, a live-streaming platform, watching other people play the game.

The full report is completely free and available for download here: markets.funderbeam.com/reports

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Funderbeam
Funderbeam Wire

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