In a World Let Loose, Video Game Makers Are ‘Doubling Down’

In January, Microsoft reported $5 billion in quarterly revenue from gaming for the first time, in part because of a new generation of Xbox consoles. The company also bought ZeniMax Media, which publishes games like Skyrim and Fallout, for $7.5 billion in September.

Microsoft’s games business now aims to expand in places like Africa by promoting its cloud gaming service, xCloud, Mr. Spencer said. In cloud gaming, games are hosted in a company’s data centers and broadcast to consumers’ devices so they don’t need to install the games or use expensive hardware.

“If you look over the last decade, gaming has been on a double-digit growth pattern,” Mr. Spencer said. “No doubt the pandemic has had an accelerated impact.”

At Take-Two, based in New York, profits jumped 46 percent over the last year. The company has brought on about 700 game developers in the last 12 months, expanding its work force by 10 percent, and is spending heavily on technology and marketing, Mr. Zelnick said.

“In many ways, it’s an investment year as we build for the future,” he said.

Niantic, the San Francisco company that produced the mobile game Pokemon Go, expects to increase its work force by about 25 percent this year to nearly 900 people, said John Hanke, its chief executive. The company was preparing to introduce two new games, one based on the board game Settlers of Catan and the other on the Pikmin franchise, with eight more in development.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/30/business/video-games-after-pandemic.html