Bits of Signum 5.1.2020
Molson Coors Brewing (TAP) earnings call comment yesterday was good for esports and many others in big tech.“We have prioritized and shifted media to platforms where we expect higher viewership like gaming, online video and social media while suspending on-premise activation and reducing or eliminating other platforms that have been impacted.
Happy Friday. There were a lot of public co earnings this week with gaming read throughs - See below from GOOGL, FB, MSFT, and AMZN earnings calls. Even Akamai (AKAM) was asked to get granular on whether media strength was OTT Video or gaming, and they said it was probably OTT but it was a very, very strong gaming quarter, especially in March, especially over the last couple of weeks of March as shelter-in-place orders came in.
A lot happened in the topic we are most passionate about - the crossover of Digital Assets (blockchain/crypto) &Video Gaming (and other forms of entertainment) aka Non Fungible Tokens (NFTs). See links to Medium posts on the topic below from 2/1/20 and 2/11/19.
Travis Scott’s five concerts drew 27.7 million unique viewers according to Epic, so yes, this was a big deal. Not as publicized but equally exciting to me was an experiment by Rogue One Star Wars writer Gary Whitta - he created “Animal Talking”, a Talk Show inside Animal Crossing. First, after hearing that it took many months to orchestrate the Travis Scott concert, I was surprised to hear that Gary was able to create the backdrop in a few hours. Second, Twitch added a MUSIC tab this week. (see screenshot above)
On the same day as the new Twitch tab, Gary decided to invite a singer he ran across on Twitch, @RaquelLily, to perform in his show. It was awesome! Here is a screenshot of the show happening now -
Also this week, I attended the Gamesbeat Summit which was an incredible experience because we were all on Zoom for both presentations and Q&A breakout sessions. The sessions felt a lot more personal than most in-person conferences and were arguably more valuable because we could attend more sessions. Bullets / highlights from the conference available upon request this weekend.
Speaking of, bon weekend and stay safe!
Angie
The Future of Entertainment and Gaming is Happier— NFT Primer 1
Marshmello Saturday / Super Bowl Sunday— One Year Later
Digital Assets
Max Fiege | LinkedIn | Twitter | Email
HEADLINES
Silvergate Exchange Network (SEN) transactions were up 80% QoQ, 324% YoY
Fee income, client numbers both made new highs
Telegram offers to return funds back to ICO investors amid SEC enforcement
Refund either a 72% of invested value in short order, or 110% denominated in company equity come April 2021
Announcement comes following the SEC’s objection to the Blockchain Association’s amicus brief on behalf of Telegram
Binance launches Bitcoin mining pool
Lowest fees in the pool mining space at 2.5%
Reflects Binance’s efforts to create a vertical crypto ecosystem across mining/staking, trading, and spending digital assets
Keep Protocol launched tBTC, a BTC-collateralized token on Ethereum
Allows users to deposit BTC and mint tBTC secured by a federation of validators like a16z and Polychain Capital.
Integrated with Uniswap, OasisDEX, Balancer, Kyber, Wyre, and 1inch by mid-May
M&A AND RAISES
a16z closes raise for second fund at $515M
Ebang IPO raises $100M for the Chinese ASIC manufacturer
UMA Protocol conducts first Initial DEX Offering via Uniswap, raising $600K+
Taurus Group raises $11M in its bid to become the digital asset infrastructure provider for increasingly-regulated European banks
Disruptive Entertainment
Nik Vantzos | LinkedIn | Email
HEADLINES
Big Tech Earnings were this week; here’s some gaming-mention excerpts:
Microsoft (Q3 2020 Earnings; posted 4/29)
All-time record gaming engagement in Q1 (90M Xbox Live active users); Xbox Game Pass > 10M subscribers; increased monetization of in-game content & services.
Project xCloud gaming service now has “hundreds of thousands of users in preview” across 7 countries.
Xbox content and services +2% “on a high prior year comp”, with strong growth in Game Pass subscriptions and Minecraft; high gaming expectations ahead - MSFT is expecting “high-teens [revenue] growth [in 2020]” and continued strong engagement numbers.
Facebook (Q1 2020 Earnings; posted 4/29)
Mark Zuckerberg discussed FB’s “big areas of investment [in gaming]”, including game streaming, mobile games, and Facebook’s new gaming app.
VR Gaming - Zuckerberg noted Oculus Quest “Has surpassed our expectations”.
Despite pandemic-driven supply shortages, Oculus products saw huge sales bumps in early Q1, which likely wasn’t driven by Corona, and rather by headset demand from Half-Life: Alyx’s launch (players could buy an Oculus Quest or Rift 2 for $399 vs. $999 for a Valve Index). This reinforces the question - will the introduction of AAA games into VR be the inflection into mass-relevance VR tech has been waiting for?
Google (Q1 2020 Earnings; posted 4/28)
Not much discussion around Videogaming, but we did see big moves around Stadia, with Google announcing game creation platform, Crayta, launching on Stadia this summer, as well as bringing on PUBG and titles from EA & Square Enix; Google also got rid of its Stadia Base branding and launched a free tier
Amazon (Q1 2020 Earnings; posted 4/28)
“Things like video conferencing, gaming, remote learning, entertainment all are seeing much higher growth and usage.”
Lot of positive sentiment around gaming among “Big Tech”. Amazon didn’t go into as much detail, but they are certainly making big pushes in the space, with their moves into publishing and their intentions to layer interactive gaming into Twitch Streams. Speaking of mega companies, it will be interesting to see when/if Disney will make their big splash into gaming.
Epic releases viewership numbers for full slate of Fortnite Travis Scott concerts
We saw the success of the first of Travis Scott’s five Fortnite shows in last Thursday’s opener (12.3M views); we’re now seeing the full picture with 27.7M unique viewers and 45.8M total views across all 5 shows (last Thursday - Sunday across three geographies - 2x The Americas, 2x EU & ME, 1x Asia & Oceania).
Valorant’s esports scene continues its rollout
We’ve seen talent from fledgling esports leagues make the jump to Valorant’s scene, largely driven by trust in Riot Games’ ability to create and foster a successful and inclusive esports model
In line with Riot’s organic development strategy, G2 Esports (top European Esports team) put on an early competitive event in the space - G2 Esports European Brawl - that took place on Monday, April 27th. We saw peak viewers of ~112,000, which isn’t bad for a semi-casual, early-go at a competition around a new gaming franchise. Team Nordics took home 1st place.
M&A AND RAISES
Scopely acquired PierPlay (mobile game developer in LA). Financials undisclosed
More Detail on Transcend Fund’s (new $50M gaming fund in SF) structure and strategy. Transcend invested in Nifty Games’ $12M Series A alongside March Capital Partners, aXiomatic, Defy VC, Vulcan Capital, Century Game, and OneTeam Ventures (mid-April)
Guilded raised a $7M Series A to build a gaming chat platform; led by Matrix Partners