News Digest 41: Top Gaming News This Week
04 June, 2020 | By Anzu
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This week saw a dearth of global protests, calls-to-action, and continued coronavirus coverage around the world. As each of us individually decides how we want to proceed and focus our time and energy, we can clearly see that the gaming industry keeps pushing forward with fresh innovations.
Zynga Inc. has agreed to buy Turkish mobile-game maker Peak for $1.8 billion, making its biggest acquisition ever during an industry boom fueled by consumers having to stay at home during the coronavirus pandemic. The Peak deal will bring Zynga a popular lineup of puzzle games called Toon Blast and Toy Blast. As the pandemic drives a search for diversions, the company is making the acquisition at a time when video game companies are thriving along with purveyors of video and audio streaming. According to the estimates, this acquisition is expected to boost the number of average users playing Zynga’s games daily by more than 60%. Find more exciting figures around the deal on Bloomberg.
Vodafone Giants parent company Giants Gaming Esports announced that it has acquired the Spanish esports team x6tence. The acquisition is one of several strategic business deals made by Giants Gaming in 2020, following a $3.3M USD investment last month, as well as multiple sponsorship deals with brands such as Nike, Chupa Chups, and Danone’s Font Vella. The organization plans to integrate x6tence into its company structure by onboarding the team’s management and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive roster, reports the Esports Observer.
Swedish game technology startup LootLocker has closed a seed funding round worth $250,000. Investment came from across the Swedish games scene, including Avalanche Studios co-founder Linus Blomberg and former DICE CEO Karl Magns Troedsson, among others. GamesIndustry.biz clarifies that LootLocker was founded only in 2019 and provides features, backend services, and live ops tools for indie developers to build, ship and run their games.
Apple’s Beats by Dr. Dre brand is turning its attention to esports to promote a fresh set of colors for its $249 best-selling headphones. It’s the first time Beats has done anything in the esports arena, the company says, and its latest campaign features one of the most well-known teams in the space: FaZe Clan. It kicked off with a stunt, in which a drone delivered the new headphones to FaZe Clan’s home in Los Angeles.It was a clever move, given social-distancing guidelines, and because video games such as Call of Duty and Fortnite make use of drones to deliver ammo or other items to players, the company says. Ad Age quotes Chris Thorne, the brand’s global CMO, saying that the current climate has made it “necessary to experiment in marketing right now.” Find all the details and get a creativity infusion by following the link to the article.
Digiday gives us a heads-up reporting that TikTok may soon join the roster of game streaming platforms! Here are some facts: TikTok’s new CEO Kevin Mayer has already stated that one of his goals is to expand the presence of gaming on the platform, and live streaming capabilities specifically for video games could be a part of that. TikTok parent Bytedance has already made a push into gaming, mostly in China with a new gaming division that makes its own games. Moreover, the newly founded TalentX Gaming -- a TalentX Entertainment and esports company ReKTGlobal joint venture -- will seek to bring more TikTok stars into the gaming world that already exists on YouTube and Twitch and expand gaming content on TikTok itself. Let’s stay tuned to see whether TikTok could actually compete with streaming giants like Twitch, but now is definitely the perfect time to move into gaming!
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