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Pokémon GO creator Niantic closes $190M funding round

Published January 3, 2019

Mobile AR gaming startup Niantic has closed a $190 million round of funding according to newly filed SEC docs.

The filing comes after a WSJ report last month suggested the company was in the process of closing a $200 million raise from investors, including IVP, aXiomatic Gaming and Samsung, at a $3.9 billion valuation. The round closed shortly after that report on December 20 according to the new documents.

With the close of this round, Niantic has now raised more than $415 million to date. The startup’s other investors include Founders Fund, Spark Capital and Alsop Louie Partners, among others. The filing details that there were 26 investors in this funding round.

The new influx of cash comes as the creator of Pokémon GO prepares to release its next major title, Harry Potter: Wizards Unite. The augmented reality game does not have a release date yet, but is expected to launch this year.

Niantic reportedly raising $200M at $3.9B valuation

Zelda has a minus world

Published January 3, 2019

Listen, everyone. It’s not every day that a new fact comes to light regarding a game that came out more than 30 years ago. And I happen to love it when retro games get broken in fabulous and entertaining ways. So the news that The Legend of Zelda for NES has a minus world like Super Mario Bros. and others hit me like a freight train.

The phenomenon was discovered by YouTuber SKELUX, who starts off his video with a quick explanation of how minus worlds work. If you think about an NES game as a big file, there are places where graphics are stored, sounds and music are described and, of course, level layouts and enemy logic are kept.

As a player, you are expected to navigate the structured parts of this file, namely the game world — level 1, 2, 3, this or that dungeon or town, etc. But there are ways to escape that structure by exploiting flaws in the game’s code, letting you run free in portions of the game’s data that aren’t meant to be “real” levels — yet the game’s engine will interpret the data as best it can, producing in some cases pretty wacky but still navigable levels. This type of thing gets its name from Super Mario Bros., where you could easily warp to a buggy level “-1” and progress from there.

Zelda and other games often use data trickery to get around the natural limitations of 8-bit computing and severely restricted storage space. For instance, did you know that in order to store them more efficiently, Zelda’s dungeons all fit together like giant tiles?

I just about lost my mind when I found out about that. Note that the above is two 16×8 grids set one on top of the other.

As SKELUX explains, the overhead map is similarly divided, except the bottom “half” isn’t actually filled with map data. And although there are cheats that let you walk through walls, the game’s code detects when you reach an invalid map coordinate and returns you to the starting location. But a little hackery takes that safety measure out of play and the result:

A new world!

And a horribly buggy one, as it turns out right from the start. Octoroks are shooting boomerangs out of their snouts; the old man on one screen tells you it’s dangerous to go alone, then next door says “leave your life of money”; a Molblin caterpillar shoots fireballs at you; glitchy inverted witch women swarm the statues of Death mountain; and so on.

It’s a strange, hilarious world, and one that obviously was not crafted but is simply created on the fly by the game’s engine attempting to make sense of the data it’s reading. It isn’t canon.

This type of video game archaeology is endlessly fascinating to me, because it demonstrates both the fragility and the robustness of these venerable pieces of software — and, of course, the enduring love and interest they engender in fans. Another one that recently absorbed my attention was the explanation of parallel dimensions inside Super Mario 64 and how sliding between them lets you beat a level with only half a press of the jump button.

That’s all. Please return to your ordinary lives, which likely seem just a bit more ordinary now that you know one more magical secret of the Legend of Zelda.

Hey look, it’s the Samsung Galaxy S10

Published January 3, 2019

Well, what have we here? If it isn’t the Samsung Galaxy S10, courtesy of perennial smartphone outer, EVLeaks. This marks one the first good looks we’ve got at the phone, which is likely due out in a couple of months at Mobile World Congress.

It’s a pretty rough photo — the icons are all blurred out and the cropping job isn’t great, likely in an effort to conceal the source. But it’s a pretty decent shot of the front — and hey, we probably have a month and change to go for the thing to start leaking like crazy.

The most interesting bit here is probably the least surprising. After holding off on the notch last generation, Samsung has skipped it over entirely, instead opting for the hole-punch camera design we recently noted would be all the rage in 2019 smartphones. Huawei, notably, already beat Samsung to the proverbial hole-punch late last year with the Nova 4.

Samsung Galaxy S10 “Beyond 1,” in the wild. pic.twitter.com/EMquh59Kln

— Evan Blass (@evleaks) January 3, 2019

The “Beyond 1” mentioned here is the working title for the flagship phone. “Beyond 2” will likely be the S10 Plus, while the “Beyond 0” is expected to be a budget version, akin to the iPhone XR.

Another tidbit from the new leak is the phone’s apparent ability to wirelessly charge compatible handsets and perhaps even Samsung wearables. That would put the product in line with another recent Huawei handset, the Mate 20 Pro.

Scratch 3.0 is now available

Published January 3, 2019

The only kids’ programming language worth using, Scratch, just celebrated the launch of Scratch 3.0, an update that adds some interesting new functionality to the powerful open-source tool.

Scratch, for those without school-aged children, is a block-based programming language that lets you make little games and “cartoons” with sprites and animated figures. The system is surprisingly complex, and kids have created things like Minecraft platformers, fun arcade games and whatever this is.

The new version of scratch includes extensions that allow you to control hardware, as well as new control blocks.

Scratch 3.0 is the next generation of Scratch – designed to expand how, what, and where you can create with Scratch. It includes dozens of new sprites, a totally new sound editor, and many new programming blocks. And with Scratch 3.0, you are able to create and play projects on your tablet, in addition to your laptop or desk computer.

Scratch is quite literally the only programming “game” my kids will use again and again, and it’s an amazing introduction for kids as young as pre-school age. Check out the update and don’t forget to share your animations with the class!

Cloudera and Hortonworks finalize their merger

Published January 3, 2019

Cloudera and Hortonworks, two of the biggest players in the Hadoop big data space, today announced that they have finalized their all-stock merger. The new company will use the Cloudera brand and will continue to trade under the CLDR symbol on the New York Stock Exchange.

“Today, we start an exciting new chapter for Cloudera as we become the leading enterprise data cloud provider,” said Tom Reilly, chief executive officer of Cloudera, in today’s announcement. “This combined team and technology portfolio establish the new Cloudera as a clear market leader with the scale and resources to drive continued innovation and growth. We will provide customers a comprehensive solution-set to bring the right data analytics to data anywhere the enterprise needs to work, from the Edge to AI, with the industry’s first Enterprise Data Cloud.”

The companies describe the deal as a “merger of equals,” though Cloudera stockholders will own about 60 percent of the equity in the company.

The combined company expects to generate more than $720 million in revenue from its 2,500 customers that rely on it to help them manage the complexities of processing their data. While Hadoop itself is open source and freely available, Cloudera and Hortonworks abstract away most of the infrastructure. Both focused on slightly different markets, though, with Hortonworks going after a more technical user and a pure open-source approach, while Cloudera also offered some proprietary tools.

“Together, we are well-positioned to continue growing and competing in the streaming and IoT, data management, data warehousing, machine learning/AI and hybrid cloud markets,” said Hortonworks CEO Rob Bearden back when the deal was first announced. “Importantly, we will be able to offer a broader set of offerings that will enable our customers to capitalize on the value of their data.”

Cloudera and Hortonworks announce $5.2 billion merger

Apple stock has dropped 38 percent in 90 days

Published January 3, 2019

Apple stock was down more than 9 percent overnight and continued the downward trend in trading this morning. In fact, the company’s stock price is down a total of 38 percent since October. This, after the company halted trading yesterday afternoon to provide lower guidance for upcoming earnings. As the iPhone upgrade market softened, it was having a big impact on revenue, at least in the short term, and Apple stock took a big hit as a result.

On October 3, the stock was selling at 232.07 per share, and while the price has fluctuated and the market in general has plunged in that time period, the stock has been on a downward trend for the past couple of months and has lost approximately $87 a share since that October high point.

Last night, before the company briefly stopped trading to make its announcement, the stock stood at $157.92 a share. This morning as we went to publication, it was recovering a bit, but was still down 8.19 percent to $144.981.

D.A. Davidson senior analyst Tom Forte says yesterday’s announcement, while not completely unexpected, was surprising, given Apple’s traditionally strong position. “We knew that iPhone unit sales were weak, but just not how weak,” he said.

The biggest factor in yesterday’s announcement, in Forte’s view, was China, where he says the company generates 20 percent of its sales. As the U.S.-China trade war drags on, it’s having an impact on these sales. This could be because of a combination of factors, including a weakening Chinese economy as a result of the trade war, or patriotism on the part of Chinese consumers, who are choosing to buy Chinese brands over of the iPhone.

This also comes at a time when Apple had already indicated that iPhone sales were weak in other worldwide markets, including India, Russia, Brazil and Turkey. This already helped weaken the iPhone sales worldwide, although Forte still sees the Chinese market as the biggest factor in play here.

Forte says that in spite of the soft iPhone performance, the good news is the rest of the product portfolio is up 19 percent, and that could bode well for the future. What’s more, the company has set aside $100 billion for stock buy-back purposes. “They have the balance sheet. They have the stock buy-back program. They still generate very significant free cash flow, and if the individual investor won’t buy the stock, then the company will buy the stock,” he explained.

In a report released this morning, financial analysts Canaccord Genuity believe that in spite of yesterday’s report, the company is still fundamentally sound and they continue to recommend a BUY for Apple stock. “We maintain our belief Apple can expand its leading market share of the premium-tier smartphone market and the iPhone installed base (excluding refurbished iPhones) will exceed 700M in 2018. This impressive installed base should drive iPhone replacement sales and earnings, as well as cash flow generation to fund strong long-term capital returns. We reiterate our BUY rating but decrease our price target to $190 based on our lowered estimates,” the company wrote in a report released this morning.

Forte says the unknown-unknown here is how the U.S.-China trade war plays out, and as long as that situation remains fluid, the company might not recover that income in the near term in spite of stronger sales across the catalog.

Workplace, Facebook’s enterprise platform, adds another major customer, Nestlé

Published January 3, 2019

While Facebook continues to repair its image with consumers disenchanted with the social network’s role in disseminating misleading or false information and mishandling their personal data, it’s ironically been finding some traction for its enterprise-focused service, Workplace. Today, the company announced that it has added another huge company to its books: Nestlé, the coffee, chocolate and FMCG giant with 2,000 brands and 240,000 employees, has signed up as its latest customer.

Facebook’s enterprise service competes against the likes of Microsoft Teams, Slack and smaller players like Crew and Zinc, among many others in a crowded market of mobile and desktop apps built to address a growing interest among organizations to have more user-friendly, modern ways for their employees to communicate.

Workplace positions itself as different from its competitors in a couple of ways: it says its communications platform is designed for all different employment demographics, covering so-called knowledge workers (the traditional IT customer) as well as waged and front-line employees; but it also claims to be the most democratic of the pack, by virtue of being a Facebook product, designed for mass market use from the ground up.

In the workplace, that translates to apps that do not require company email addresses or company devices to use; a strong proportion of employees at Workplace’s bigger customers, such as Walmart (2.2 million employees) and Starbucks (nearly 240,000 employees) do not sit at desks and, until relatively recently, would not have been using any kind of PC or phone on a regular basis on any average day.

But as smartphones have become as ubiquitous as having your keys and wallet, acceptance of having them and utilising them to communicate workplace-related information has changed, and that is the wave that services like Workplace are hoping to ride.

But despite the strong engine that is Facebook behind it, Workplace has a lot of challenges ahead.

The company has not updated its total number of customers in more than a year at this point — its last milestone was 30,000 customers, back in November 2017 — and today Facebook VP Julien Codorniou said the company might put out a more updated number later this year.

“We’re not using that metric to communicate our success,” he said, “but we have to communicate growth, I feel the demand from the market.” Slack claims 500,000 organizations, more than 70,000 of which pay; Teams from Microsoft has some 329,000 customers, the company says.

There also is the issue of how a customer win is actually translating to usage. Last month, a much smaller competitor, Crew, with 25,000 customers, noted that at least some of them were in fact those that Workplace was claiming to have secured.

“Starbucks is theoretically using Workplace, but it’s been deployed only to managers,” Crew CEO Danny Leffel told me. “We have almost 1,000 Starbucks locations using Crew. We knew we had a huge presence there, and we were worried when Facebook won them, but we haven’t seen even a dent in our business so far.”

Codorniou said that this also doesn’t tell the full story. He describes the approach that Crew and others take as “shadow IT,” in that the companies don’t talk to central HQ when winning the business. “You can’t give a voice to everyone by going in through the back,” he said. He also contends that it just takes time to deploy something across a massive business. “Workplace only works if you get 100 percent of the company using it,” he added. Notably, today Facebook announced that Nestlé has already onboarded 210,000 customers to Workplace.

There is also the bigger question of how these products will develop technically to further differentiate from the pack. For now, it feels like Slack still reigns supreme when it comes to desktop knowledge worker functionality — even without usefully threaded comments — because of the fact that you can integrate virtually any other app you might want to into its platform.

Crew, meanwhile, has differentiated by focusing on providing handy tools to help businesses managing scheduling for shift workers, which comprise the majority of its user base.

Others like Teams, and yes, Workplace, have also added integrations and their own functionality — Workplace’s most interesting features, I think, are how it has translated consumer-Facebook features like Live into the Workplace environment. But there is still a lot of space for apps to consider what other features and functionality will be most useful for the most employees and for the business customer at large.

It will be interesting to see how and if this is affected by way of a key leadership appointment. Last month, Facebook appointed a new “head” of Workplace, Karandeep Anand, who came to Facebook three years ago from Microsoft (and thus has a close understanding of enterprise software). Codorniou said Anand would be relocating to London, where Workplace is developed, and will focus on the technical development of the product while Codorniou focuses on sales, client relations and business development.

Technical leadership for Workplace had previously come straight from CTO Mike Schroepfer, Codorniou said. “We decided that we needed someone full time, here in London,” he said.

It’s not clear if Workplace’s win at Nestlé is replacing another product; it seems, however, that it is more likely a trend of how more businesses are making an investment in company-wide communications platforms where they may never have had one before, in hopes of it helping keep employees switched on, linked up and generally more happy and feeling less like expendable cogs.

“Nestlé is a people-first environment,” said EVP Chris Johnson, in a statement. “We really rely on our talented teams to manage more than 2,000 Nestlé brands worldwide. We help our employees develop and we give them the right tools, so Workplace is a perfect fit.”

PR management firm Cision is acquiring Falcon.io to expand into social media marketing

Published January 3, 2019

Social media has become a primary conduit for getting the word out, in some cases proving to be an even stronger force for publicity than more traditional media outlets and paid advertising, and so today, a company that has grown its business around public relations services has acquired a social media management company to make sure it has a foothold in the medium. Cision, which provides press release distribution, media monitoring and other PR services to businesses and the media industry, has acquired Falcon.io, a startup founded in Denmark that lets companies post, manage and analyse their presence on social media platforms.

Terms of the deal are not being disclosed, the companies tell me, but the whole of the Falcon team, including CEO/founder Ulrik Bo Larsen, are joining the company, where they will continue to operate its existing product set as well as integrate it into Cision’s wider business. The last valuation noted in April 2017 at the Danish Companies House was about $52 million (€45 million), but they have been growing very rapidly, and one source tells us that the price paid was around $200-$225 million, while Danish publication Borsen says it’s 800 million Danish kroner, or around $122 million. I’m still trying to get more detail.

Falcon had raised around $25 million according to PitchBook, and it has never disclosed its valuation. Cision — well-known to many journalists — is publicly traded and currently has a market cap of just under $1.6 billion. For some context, two other prominent social media management firms that compete with Falcon, Sprout Social and Hootsuite, are respectively valued at $800 million and anywhere between $750 million and $1 billion (depending on who you ask).

The latter two are bigger firms — Falcon has around 1,500 businesses as customers that use it to manage their social profiles and read social sentiment across platforms like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, while Sprout says it has around 25,000 and Hootsuite counts millions of individual users — and both have raised significantly more capital, but their valuations underscore the demand that we’re seeing for platforms and user-friendly tools to target the world’s social media users — estimated to number at upwards of 2.5 billion people globally.

Kevin Akeroyd, who came on as Cision’s CEO after long stints at both Oracle and Salesforce, among other places, describes Falcon as a “top five” social media marketing and analytics firm, and in an interview he said that the new acquisition will form a key part of the “communications cloud” that Cision has been building.

As with Salesforce, Oracle and Adobe (which also use similar cloud-themed terminology to describe their product suites), Cision’s strategy is to build a one-stop shop for customers to manage all their communications needs from one platform. Falcon itself may be smaller than its competitors, but the idea is that it will be cross-sold to Cision’s customers, which currently number 75,000 businesses.

“We’re seeing too many of our customers using one application for content, another for something else, and so on. There are too many apps,” Akeroyd said. “We have always believed in earned media” — that is, media mentions that are not in the form of paid advertising — “and the role of influencers alongside paid and owned marketing. We believe we could provide the first solution for businesses across earned, communications services and public relations, helping to build a better data stack to measure and attribute what you are doing in comms.”

As social networking companies like Facebook and Twitter build more of their own tools in-house to serve the social media needs of organizations that want to better manage their profiles and interactions on these platforms, this has led to some consolidation and shifts among social media management companies. Some are merging or getting acquired, and some are shopping themselves around.

And in that wider trend, it’s not too surprising to see public relations firms get in on the action. Social media has completely changed the landscape for how information is disseminated today, sometimes complementing what traditional media organizations do — there are many examples of how newspapers and other news outlets leverage, for example, Facebook to grow and communicate with their audiences — and often replacing traditional media altogether. (Pew last month said that social media outpaced newspapers for the first time as a news source in the U.S., although TV and radio are still bigger than social… for now.)

Given that public relations management has long been the connecting link between organisations and media outlets, they have had to take a bigger step into social media in order to provide to their clients a more complete picture of the media landscape. Cision is not the first to have done this: Last year, Meltwater, another media monitoring firm, acquired DataSift to add social signals and traffic to its platform mix.

“This consolidation has to come because there is just too much value for the user,” Akeroyd said. “CMOs and CCOs do not want their own islands, they want something bigger.”

Sorry that I took so long to upgrade, Apple

Published January 2, 2019

Apple had some bad news tonight. It was so bad, in fact, that it had to halt trading for a time while posting a grim report that its numbers would be lower than it had forecast at the last quarterly earnings report in November. Apple blamed faltering sales in Asia, particularly in China, for the adjustment, but I’m afraid it can lay at least part of the blame on me, too.

You see, I was part of the problem, as well. On the bright side, I finally upgraded my iPhone this week. I had been using an old iPhone 6 that was more than three years old. It had become crotchety with a bad battery life, and the recharge cable wouldn’t say stuck without some serious coaxing. The phone had to be flat on a table, and would often disconnect if I even brushed against the cord or looked at it the wrong way.

I had been thinking about upgrading for several months, but I kept putting it off because the thought of spending $1,000 for a new phone frankly irked me, and I had, after all, paid off my trusty 6 in full long ago. I was going to squeeze every bit of life out of it, dammit.

In spite of my great frustration with my old phone, it took the enticement of a $200 credit to finally get me to replace it, as I’m sure the promotion was intended to do. Just yesterday, on New Year’s Day, I headed to my closest Apple Store and I finally did right by the company.

I replaced my ancient 6, but I did something else that probably hurt Apple as part of its death by a thousand cuts. I went into the store thinking I would buy the more expensive XS, but in the end I walked out with the lower-cost XR. I looked at the two phones and I couldn’t justify spending more than $1,000 for a phone with 256 GB of storage. I wanted a phone with longer battery life and a decent display and camera, and the XR gave it to me. Yes, I could have gotten an even better phone, but in the end, the XR was good enough for me, and certainly a huge upgrade over what I had been using.

Clearly lots of people across the world had similar thoughts, and one thing led to another and, before you knew it, you had a situation on your on your hands, one that forced you to halt the trading of your stock and report the bad news. The stock price is paying the price, down more than 7 percent as I write this post.

So, sorry Apple, but it appears that there is a tipping point when it comes to the cost of a new phone. As essential as these devices have become in our lives, it’s just too hard for many consumers around the world to justify spending more than $1,000 for a new phone, and you just have to realize that.

Will the gaming industry clutch up in 2019?

Published January 2, 2019

Joost van Dreunen
Contributor

Joost van Dreunen is the co-founder of the game analytics firmSuperData, a Nielsen company.

2019 promises to be a great year in games. Innovation and competition will elevate the industry’s offerings and drive more inclusivity among a broader range of audiences.

Cloud gaming emerges as the new frontier and brings about unlikely partnerships.

Collectively, gamers will serve as the canary in the coal mine as large tech companies look to introduce new technologies to mainstream consumer audiences. Companies like Amazon, Tencent, Google and Microsoft already own and operate massive data centers that virtually run enterprise applications. In 2019, we will see continued investment in infrastructure and content acquisition as these billion-dollar companies seek to claim the consumer market.

Cloud gaming is a massive market opportunity that extends beyond just interactive entertainment. Microsoft already generates significant revenues from cloud-based services, and doubling down on gaming will open the door to broader adoption by consumers and a bigger piece of the market.

It also comes with significant competition, each player with their own motivations. Tencent, for one, got hit hard with a slowdown in mobile game approvals by the Chinese government, causing its share price to drop. Since then, things have started to improve somewhat, but it has incentivized Tencent to reduce its exposure in gaming and look for other non-content business segments that generate steady revenue and require less government regulation. For the first three quarters of 2018, Tencent’s cloud operations generated $864 million (RMB 6 billion) in revenues and more than doubled year-over-year.

Google has also been trying to wiggle its way into the cloud gaming business. Its cloud operations make about $10 billion annually, and recently appointed a new CEO likely to expand Google Cloud’s vertical product capabilities in non-tech categories.

And there is, of course, Amazon. With currently more than 50 percent market share in cloud computing and a strong user acquisition and engagement channel with Twitch, Amazon is uniquely positioned. But its previous efforts around interactive entertainment have so far not produced any real tangible results despite it ramping up expenditure. This makes it more likely that Amazon will become a third-party infrastructure provider for companies like Sony and Nintendo instead.

As these titans double down on cloud gaming initiatives, we can expect to see some surprising partnerships. For instance, Tencent and Google are currently working together in China. This gives the latter an entry point into a market that has long been out of reach. Meanwhile, incumbents like Sony, Nintendo and legacy game publishers will have to decide on going at it alone, as is the case of Electronic Arts, or buddying up and surrendering a piece of revenue.

Gamers win as the PC games market breaks into pieces.

It’s not a bad thing. But after more than a decade of a virtual monopoly held by Valve, new contenders have emerged. We already saw how Valve tried to get in front of Epic’s announcement that it was lowering its platform fees. And not long after, Discord popped up with an even better rate.

Breaking with the standard 30 percent cut, which is what most platforms (Apple, Facebook) claim in exchange for their services, Valve announced a few major changes. Two key sentences from the announcement. First, Valve’s new revenue distribution: “when a game makes over $10 million on Steam, the revenue share for that application will adjust to 75%/25% on earnings beyond $10M. At $50 million, the revenue share will adjust to 80%/20% on earnings beyond $50M.” Succinctly, make more and keep more.

Part of what is driving this is consolidation at the top. In the PC market the top-line firms have been growing at an incredible rate. Between 2013 and 2017, Activision grew its PC operations at +10 percent compound annual growth rate. EA’s was +30 percent, and Bethesda’s +36 percent. Meanwhile, the share of the top four public companies, based on PC gaming revenue, grew from 44 percent to 60 percent in that same period. It’s getting less crowded at the top and digital stores will have to compete.

The big publishers like Activision, Ubisoft and EA already have their digital storefronts and distribution platforms. Different from the brick-and-mortar space, publishers managed to build their own rather than rely on third-parties. For years, the big guys have had no interest in putting their content side-by-side with a growing number of small and medium-sized game companies.

Epic’s wild success with Fortnite has afforded it a much broader range of strategic options. So far it has lowered its store fees and retroactively paid developers on its platform. And now it is budding into the digital PC market by using its vast financial resources to compete head-on with Valve. Finally, Discord’s entry should be noted, too. Adding a content offering to an existing community, rather than the other way around, Discord is the new hot thing. Certainly, it has yet to lay claim to a hit title of its own. But it has both the expertise and critical mass to become an important next store front. It raised an additional $150 million right before the holidays.

All this takes place against the backdrop of a declining physical games market. It’s been a tough few months in meat space. In its recent earnings, GameStop came in at $2.08 billion and +4.8 percent in global sales, but Wall Street was not impressed. GameStop blamed Call of Duty and “sports titles.” With the recent sell-off of Spring Mobile to lower its debt, the specialty retailer continues on the hunt for new leadership, either in the form of a new CEO (unlikely) or new owner (likely). Whoever is going to scoop up GameStop is probably waiting for 19Q1 when sales dip and its valuation will be lower.

The breaking up of Valve’s dominance is good for players and companies that make games. Consumers will get better prices and more choice, and the various digital stores will compete over functionality and improved user experience. This is a win-win for all.

Walled gardens will be broken down, enabling cross-platform play with anyone, anywhere.

Despite digitization, the bulk of interactive entertainment has remained within one of the various walled gardens. That is going to change. Like telecom networks that allow people to speak to each other irrespective of their phone provider, so, too, will online gaming break down silos. In 2019, cross-platform play will become ubiquitous. The end of 2018 has already shown the potential of this as Fortnite’s success resulted in each of the platforms agreeing to play nicely with one another.

Legacy publishers like Activision Blizzard have also tasted what cross-platform play can do for their franchises: Hearthstone has continued to dominate the collective card game category, because it works seamlessly across PC and mobile, and offers a smooth integration with live-streaming platforms like Twitch.

Cross-platform play should be at the top of every studio’s design agenda in 2019.

Subscriptions and bundled content will drive sales in 2019.

After seeing the initial success with subscriptions enjoyed by Twitch and Microsoft’s GamePass, more companies will adopt this monetization model. Large platform holders like Sony and Apple are looking to grow their revenues by offering content subscriptions. Both of these companies have indicated they have plans to increase services revenue as a direct response to reaching the limit of how much hardware they can sell.

Game publishers have been experimenting with micro-transactions to great success. Tentpole franchises like FIFA, Hearthstone and GTA V Online have made a mint from what they call “recurrent revenues.” Beyond up-selling their audiences on a regular schedule with content updates, they will explore subscription models that will provide massive discounts and unique content to players in exchange for a more predictable revenue flows.

Video games will face more and new regulation with a focus on kids.

Now that gaming has emerged as a mainstream form of entertainment, the industry can expect more scrutiny. In addition, there will be sharper focus on kids and technology in 2019. Data companies will be increasingly under the microscope. Similar to the loot box scandal that resulted in various governments speaking out, we will see an effort focused on protecting children. This means that game companies will be held to a higher standard with regards to how they handle data on minors. Against the background of a festering trade war between eastern and western economies, data ownership, in particular around children, will emerge as a political topic and strategic business challenge.

It also means that titles like Fortnite will be fingered as culprits in narratives around an erosion of culture and well-being (although this is largely driven by misinformed industry critics). The title’s appeal to younger audiences will make it a likely scapegoat as the usual choir sings its disdain for video games. This year’s congressional hearing in the U.S. more than satisfied our need for examples of how disconnected government representatives are from technology used by literally everyone else. Different from previous generations, however, I expect the companies currently at the top of the food chain to know exactly how to respond. They will push titles that offer a safe, pleasant space for kids to play, uninterrupted by broader challenges found everywhere else.

Next year will, however, not be a continuation of exuberance as we’ve seen previously. Trends in related industries suggest that gaming, too, will move toward a more concentrated competitive landscape and closer government monitoring.

Image: Bryce Durbin/TechCrunch

Further consolidation is imminent for the games industry.

In response to the slowdown in consumer spending, some game companies will go out of business and others will gobble up the failing ones to strengthen their market positions. Nothing new here, but it does leave room for speculation as to who will buy whom. I previously speculated that Amazon would buy GameStop and still think they might. Only it will happen when GameStop reaches its wits end, probably at the end of Q1 2019.

Across Europe there have been a series of smaller acquisitions throughout the year, some of which are now turning sour. Starbreeze had its offices raided (which I’m told sounded worse than it was). Even so, this year the ambitious portfolio approach of buying up smaller studios and leveraging their IP against efficient distribution networks became, perhaps, too popular.

Finally, I expect companies like Tencent to continue satisfying their appetites for foreign assets. If nothing else, this year has cemented Tencent’s need to diversify as they look to mitigate some of its recent stresses by lowering its exposure to games revenue and further investing in western companies and platforms. Over the past two years its success with this strategy has greatly lowered competition across PC and mobile, the two most innovative categories.

This does not mean that innovation itself is at risk. It just means that the stakes will be higher for any firm that does not make a billion or more in revenues.

Courtesy of Feodora Chiosea/Getty Images

The coming winter brings a slowdown in growth, and possibly in revenue and innovation.

I’ve been writing about this for a while now. But don’t misunderstand: I want to be wrong about this. While I would like to predict that 2019 will bring even more growth and more money for everyone, the supporting evidence simply isn’t there.

For one, mobile gaming is showing saturation across different markets, including in China. It has evolved from insignificance to become the biggest games market worldwide and is now starting to slow. We are also at the end of the current console cycle. This simply means that the platforms are going to discount their hardware and the bulk of consumers looking to spend are disproportionately price conscious.

Overall economic indicators suggest that consumer spending, especially in the U.S., is headed to a slowdown. Following the tax breaks earlier in the year, overall spending surprised even the retailers. But that party is going to end soon. Finally, as gaming has become mainstream, its underlying economics have shifted. In broad terms this means that where previously the games industry may have seemed “counter-cyclical” it is going to follow suit with whatever happens to consumer spending at large. In addition, investors have become savvier and are starting to trade aggressively against game stocks. This means game companies are less inclined to take risks on content innovation (as in the case of EA).

The long-term silver lining here is that this imminent stagnation is the precursor of the industry’s overall transition. But before spring comes winter.

Live-streamers and influencers embark on a drama binge.

Yes, newfound fame will get the better of them and stupid things will be said. This is still the very first generation that suddenly finds itself thrust into the mainstream spotlight — they don’t have the benefit of the intense vetting that other industries have subjected their rising stars to before sending them on the main stage. With many still amateurs and competing against one another to win the favor of audiences and aggregators alike, the stakes are substantially higher.

In their hunger for attention, aspiring streamers will sacrifice their authenticity and some will undoubtedly ruin their careers before it even starts. Mounting pressures from growing competition will drive this new generation of tastemakers to “keep it real” and remain authentic. Twitch and YouTube will do what they can, I’m sure. But for many, this authenticity will be too much.

EA takes a hit in 2019.

Among the Big Three, Electronic Arts will have the toughest year. Despite its aggressive expansion effort illustrated by the acquisition of GameFly’s streaming division, EA is going to face the music with investors. This is somewhat undeserved, because financial investors insist on continual growth and generally can’t see past the next quarter. And, to be fair, EA has a few weaknesses: its revenue and its margin are highly dependent on the continuing success of FIFA Ultimate Team. In addition, it has relatively little new IP in the pipe, which makes it even more difficult for investors to care about the longer-term future. Simply put, EA can’t free itself from Wall Street’s needs as several analysts have already started to lower their expectations for the year ahead.

Photo courtesy/Getty Images/Guido Krzikowski/Bloomberg

GameStop sells, but it’s not a party.

I already predicted this last year and was almost right: GameStop has been trying to get acquired for the past six months. Its C-suite has seen better days, most recently resulting in a letter from one of its largest shareholders, Tiger Management, to get its sh!t together (aka perform a strategic review). The company has been unable to find a buyer and now finds itself forced to essentially abandon the diversification strategy it initiated in 2014 by acquiring retail chain in parallel market segments. Just recently GameStop sold off Spring Mobile and is likely to use the money to pay off its debts and improve the likelihood of some private equity firm or a company like Amazon to buy it. No one expected it to be a great year for games retail, but it’s getting sadder.