Report: Game companies raise record $1.05B in 2010, up 58 percent

by Alexander Sliwinski on Dec 24th 2010 1:30AM

VentureBeat estimates game funding by venture capital broke $1.05 billion this year, a 58 percent increase from last. It's also a significant growth from the previously recorded high of $936.8 million in 2008. The video game industry – which is now spread across boxed, digitally distributed, mobile and social (i.e. Facebook) products – has obviously given VC firms plenty of places to gamble, er, strategically invest millions of dollars.

Big winners this year (at least, those that revealed investments) were Zynga (Farmville) with $150 million from SoftBank (with, possibly, significantly more from Google). Also, ZeniMax Media (Fallout, Elder Scrolls, id Software), also received $150 million. There were also major investments in Gazillion, OnLive and Playdom. Head on over to VentureBeat to see the millions of dollars going to game companies you'll likely never hear of... ever.

Source: VentureBeat

Tags: gazillion, gazillion-entertainment, mobile, OnLive, pc, Playdom, vc, venture-capital, zenimax-media, zynga

Reader Comments (12)

Somebody, ANYBODY pass the savings onto the consumer for once in your greedy corporate lives. PLEASE!

@Bluebreaker

How about passing it onto their workers, too?
Record layoffs in the industry, with record profit, yay?

Not to mention how the industry as a whole is CONSTANTLY screaming about JUST how bad piracy is destroying everything, how AWFUL the used industry is, and how they want to restrict everything to hell and back!

Seriously, why do people defend this industry like they do :x It's like sports fans defending a football player who's been convicted of rape :x

@Bluebreaker
This is the amount of venture capital going into games, not the amount of revenue. For comparison, wikipedia says the game industry revenue was 11.7 billion in 2008. The amount of venture capitol has more to do with people investing in the industry and making guesses about how profitable it will be.

Also, for all we know, there's a lot more companies in the video game market, so even if there's an increase in revenue, it's spread over more workers. If that was true (it may or may not be), then passing on the savings may not quite work. In other words, if there's a 20% increase of revenue in the industry, but there are 20% more workers, then dropping prices will mean less money per worker. But, this is just conjecture.

WOW, 58 percent is a massive increase. Although its less than 10 percent differant than 2008 so what happened in 2009 to make it go down then up so much?