Games Investment Crawls Back In Play In Second Quarter, Up 32 Percent

Like a nearly unkillable boss character, investments in the video games business have stirred back to life after a rugged 2023, rising nearly a third over the first half of 2024 to the highest levels in nearly two years, according to

The game business, and related dealmaking, boomed during and just after the pandemic lockdown, undergirding a string of multi-billion-dollars deals led by Microsoft’s $71 billion acquisition of publisher Activision-Blizzard. Even taking that mammoth deal’s distortions out of the comps, mergers & acquisitions remain muted, still only about half of the 2023 totals when the Activision deal is set aside.

Despite all that, the glory days of game dealmaking are creeping back, the DDM statistics show, leading DDM executives to say the future is looking brighter. Most investments were in companies specializing in tools or other support capabilities. A big portion of the investments, again, has been in companies with blockchain capabilities, driven substantially by the U.S. Securities and Exchanges Commission approval of ETFs based on the Bitcoin and Ethereum cryptocurrencies in recent months.

The slow half-year in going public may be a hangover of the far broader chill in 2023 on IPOs by any companies, a chill that has only recently started to thaw.

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