Insights from Xsolla president on the latest game industry stats

venturebeat.com:

Predicting game industry trends, both the macro and micro, takes more than gut instincts and guesswork. Long-time industry veteran and President of Xsolla, Chris Hewish, joined GamesBeat’s own Dean Takahashi on stage at GamesBeat Summit 2023 to talk about what’s happening in the industry now, and share proprietary and public data and insights from partners and Xsolla’s extensive network of gaming professionals.

Mergers and acquisitions activity in the game industry dropped 43% in Q1, compared to a year ago, according to DrakeStar. The report also noticed some sector weakness, including the major drop in blockchain game investing, from more than half of all investments to only 20%.

“You could predict that, seeing that things like the crypto crash and NFT prices going down, lots of scams like FTX surfacing — all this was hurting that sector,” Takahashi said.

“Q1 this year has been off to a mixed start,” Hewish agreed, “but mixed leaning positive.”

For instance, while Games Industry.biz reported an 11% drop in EU game sales from the same period last year, the number of big releases has risen, including Elden Ring, Pokemon Legends: Arceus, Horizon: Forbidden West and Gran Turismo 7. Console hardware sales also boomed by 67% across selected European countries, driven by a demand for the PS5, which has seen 5x sales in March 2023 compared to last year.

“When you think of console, tentpole titles are always big,” Hewish says. “There are some really good indicators there that there’s a growing user base on the console side of things, with all these PlayStation sales. The second half of the year, that should result in more game sales as players want to get games to play.”

Investments are also a strong signal of what’s going on with the