What's the gaming M&A market like in 2023?
Earlier this month, Agnitio Capital founder Shum Singh hosted a panel at the Montreal International Games Summit to discuss the state of mergers and acquisitions in the games industry, and opened the presentation talking about how the pandemic boom fueled incredible M&A activity a couple years ago and gave everyone a story of some founder they knew who sold a studio for an unexpectedly generous valuation.
"Those were crazy times," he said. "Unprecedented. We'd never seen anything like that. From pretty much the moment COVID began until the spring of 2022, when the world changed. Rather than focus on those crazy times, which to be honest were kind of an aberration, we're going through a slightly different time right now."
When Singh hosted a similarly themed panel at last year's edition of the show, the boom was already in the rear-view mirror, with economic headwinds and rising inflation already areas of concerns that had cooled off the gaming sector as an M&A hotbed. The past year has only increased those headwinds, with Singh acknowledging unstable macroeconomic conditions, geopolitical risk, and instability hurting businesses across the board. Even so, he put a relatively positive spin on the situation.
"Let's be honest, a lot of people over-hired during the boom years of COVID, and that's what you're seeing," he said. "I don't think this period is difficult, I think it's just a rationalization. It's just people trimming for a lot of massive growth they experienced for years. I still think as an industry, everything is great and is going to continue to look great. We're just going through a bit of a pain period, a growing up period, whatever you want to call it."
His own company Agnitio is a gaming-focused
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