3 charts for you today:
Zynga, the gaming giant responsible for FarmVille, Words With Friends,Zynga Poker, Mafia Wars and many other titles is getting bought for $12.7 billion by Take-Two Interactive, the publisher behind Grand Theft Auto and the 2K sports series, in one of the biggest video game deals ever.
The brave new world
From its founding in 2004, until it hit one billion active users in 2012, the early years of Facebook presented an enormous opportunity for game makers. Facebook's rise meant that game makers could get in front of millions of procrastinating people by building a game directly into the Facebook platform, instead of competing for traffic on the wider internet.
Zynga took advantage of that green space better than anyone else, creating some of the most popular Facebook games such as FarmVille, Texas Hold 'Em Poker and Words With Friends, among many, many others. Every time you, or that distant cousin, successfully "invited" someone to play FarmVille on Facebook, Zynga got a new user, for free.
Pivot to mobile
Like all gold rushes, the Facebook game heyday didn't last forever. The rise of smartphones, mobile games and apps meant more competition for Zynga and its simple and addictive games. The company had to pivot, betting that mobile games would continue to grow. And grow they did.
Video games vs. the box office
The chart above gives some context on just how big the video game biz is. Last year the video game industry was pegged at somewhere around $180bn by Newzoo. That's roughly ten times what the global movie industry brought in at the box office last year. Ten times. Admittedly last year the movie industry was still dealing with a pandemic hangover, but even in its best ever year the box office only brought in $39bn.Video games may not carry the same cultural impact of movies yet, but as a market they are in a completely different league.
Mobile making moves
Mobile games, that is games played on a smartphone or tablet, have grown so quickly over the last decade that they are now bigger than console and PC games combined.
Zynga's pivot to mobile is a great example of a company that's been flexible to its rapidly changing surroundings. Mobile games almost killed the company off, now they're the reason it just got bought for $12.7bn.
A new survey from Gallup in December reveals that Americans reportedly read just 12.6 books each on average last year, down from the 15.6 average that was reported during the last survey in 2016.The data includes all forms of books, including printed books but also electronic books and audiobooks.
Book worms unite
Gallup notes that the "decline in book reading is mostly a function of how many books readers are reading, as opposed to fewer Americans reading any books". Indeed, the latest survey showed 17% of US adults did not read any books in the past year, which is pretty much exactly the same as the proportion that didn't read from previous surveys.
Reading optimists could argue that it's possible that everyone is just reading longer but fewer books than they used to, but when the data is combined with the fact that just 6% of US adults named reading as their favorite way to spend an evening, down from 12% in 2016, the diagnosis for reading as a hobby gets a little worse.
Separately, the survey also found that women read more than men, with women getting through 15.7 books last year, compared to an average of 9.5 for men. 18-34 year-olds were found to read more than any other age group (although only marginally). Full data here.
1) Uber has some new competition in Brazil — the government-backed app Taxi.Rio which has seen its usage rise by 60% in recent months.
2) New data released by the Copernicus Climate Change Service shows that 2021 was the fifth-warmest year on record. While 2021 didn't break any records itself, the new data means that the seven hottest years ever recorded have now been the last seven years.
3) Back Market, a company that operates a marketplace of refurbished smartphones for people who don't want to fork over $1,000 every 2 years for a new one, has raised a fresh round of funding at a $5.7bn valuation.
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5) Inflation has hit another record in the US, with prices rising 7% in December 2021 compared to the same month the year before. That's the fastest pace of price rises for almost 40 years.
6)Apple has removed some of the blatant copycats of the popular word game Wordle from the App Store. Separately, Apple announced that it had now paid out more than $260bn to developers since the App Store's launch in 2008, $60bn of which came last year alone.
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