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Video game revenue tops $43 billion in 2018, an 18% jump from 2017
Video game revenue in 2018 reached a new peak of $43.8 billion, up 18 percent from the previous years, surpassing the projected total global box office for the film industry, according to new data released by the Entertainment Software Association and The NPD Group.
Preliminary indicators for global box office revenues published at the end of last year indicated that revenue from ticket sales at box offices around the world would hit $41.7 billion, according to comScore data reported by Deadline Hollywood.
The $43.8 billion tally also surpasses numbers for streaming services, which are estimated to rake in somewhere around $28.8 billion for the year, according to a report in Multichannel News.
Video games and related content have become the new source of entertainment for a generation — and it’s something that has new media moguls like Netflix chief executive Reed Hastings concerned. In the company’s most recent shareholder letter, Netflix said that Fortnite was more of a threat to its business than TimeWarner’s HBO.
“We compete with (and lose to) Fortnite more than HBO,” the company’s shareholder letter stated. “When YouTube went down globally for a few minutes in October, our viewing and signups spiked for that time…There are thousands of competitors in this highly fragmented market vying to entertain consumers and low barriers to entry for those with great experiences.”
“The impressive economic growth of the industry announced today parallels the growth of the industry in mainstream American culture,” said acting ESA president and CEO Stanley Pierre-Louis, in a statement. “Across the nation, we count people of all backgrounds and stages of life among our most passionate video game players and fans. Interactive entertainment stands today as the most influential form of entertainment in America.”
Gains came from across the spectrum of the gaming industry. Console and personal computing, mobile gaming, all saw significant growth, according to Mat Piscatella, a video games industry analyst for The NPD Group.
According to the report, hardware and peripherals and software revenue increased from physical and digital sales, in-game purchases and subscriptions.
| U.S. Video Game Industry Revenue | 2018 | 2017 | Growth Percentage |
| Hardware, including peripherals | $7.5 billion | $6.5 billion | 15% |
| Software, including in-game purchases and subscriptions |
$35.8 billion |
$30.4 billion |
18% |
| Total: | $43.3 billion | $36.9 billion | 18% |
Source: The NPD Group, Sensor Tower
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Ninja raked in nearly $10 million in 2018
Twitch superstar Tyler “Ninja” Blevins has finally settled the debate over just how much he earned in 2018. CNN reports that the gaming phenom pulled in close to $10 million last year, a little tidbit that he revealed to CNN during his press campaign on New Year’s Eve in New York City. (He also tried to get the good people of Times Square to “floss.” They weren’t having it.)
Ninja has more than 20 million subscribers on YouTube, and 12.5 million followers on Twitch, 40,000 of whom are paid subscribers. Ninja told CNN that he thinks of himself as an entrepreneur, comparing his stream to a coffee shop. “They’re gonna find another coffee shop if you’re not there … you have to be there all the time,” he said to CNN.
And when he says “all the time,” he means it. The streamer said he goes live for roughly 12 hours a day, which adds up to about 4,000 hours of gaming over the year.
Part of the money earned from each ad viewed on his YouTube channel, plus part of the profits from bits, donations and monthly subscriptions (ranging from $5, $10 or $25) on Twitch, all head into Ninja’s bank account. And that doesn’t include earnings made from tournament wins and endorsement deals with brands like Uber Eats, Samsung and Red Bull.
It shows just what is possible as esports and Twitch streaming continue to grow. And one of the most influential factors in that growth over 2018 was Fortnite, where streamers and pros not only put on a show for their viewers, but also set a different, far less toxic tone than other gaming communities.
Ninja, for example, decided to stop swearing and using other toxic language as his stream grew in popularity among young people. Other Fortnite streamers, such as NickMercs and Courage, have also fostered more inclusive, supportive communities around their streams.
Epic Games is also doing its part to give streamers like Ninja the format and opportunity to create even more engaging content on their streams through high-stakes tournament and competitive play events, including the Summer and Fall Skirmishes, the Winter Royale and the less-incentivized pop-up cups.
Though $10 million is less than the earnings of top traditional athletes (LeBron James at $36 million and Aaron Rodgers with $67 million, not including endorsements), it’s clear that Ninja and other Fortnite streamers are still very much on the rise.
As long as Epic Games keeps the attention of the gaming community at large, 2019 should see even more financial growth for Ninja and other Fortnite streamers.
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Moonbug nabs $145M to buy up kids’ digital media brands
Moonbug, a kid-focused media business founded by a pair of entertainment executives, has brought in a $145 million Series A investment led by The Raine Group, a merchant bank that supports technology, media and telecom efforts.
Venture capital firms Felix Capital and Fertitta Capital also participated in the financing.
Moonbug, headquartered in London, acquires and distributes media content made for kids. Recently, the company completed its first IP acquisition of Little Baby Bum, a children’s sing-along show popular on YouTube, Amazon and Netflix. According to a Los Angeles Times report, one of the show’s videos is the 20th most popular video in YouTube history, boasting 2.1 billion views. In total, Moonbug says Little Baby Bum has clocked in 23 billion views across multiple platforms.
With its Series A investment, Moonbug will amp up its M&A activity to expand its portfolio of content that “helps children build essential life skills.” Moonbug chief executive officer René Rechtman, who spent the last three years as the head of digital studios at The Walt Disney Co., says they plan to acquire eight media businesses.
Rechtman and John Robson, a former senior vice president of digital distribution at Paramount Pictures and vice president of global content at HTC, launched Moonbug earlier this year.
“I see an independent creator and I put them in very simple brackets: one is high viewership and engagement and one is quality of IP,” Rechtman told TechCrunch. “If they have both of those, I am very interested.”
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They scaled YouTube — now they’ll shard everyone with PlanetScale
When the former CTOs of YouTube, Facebook and Dropbox seed fund a database startup, you know there’s something special going on under the hood. Jiten Vaidya and Sugu Sougoumarane saved YouTube from a scalability nightmare by inventing and open-sourcing Vitess, a brilliant relational data storage system. But in the decade since working there, the pair have been inundated with requests from tech companies desperate for help building the operational scaffolding needed to actually integrate Vitess.
So today the pair are revealing their new startup PlanetScale that makes it easy to build multi-cloud databases that handle enormous amounts of information without locking customers into Amazon, Google or Microsoft’s infrastructure. Battle-tested at YouTube, the technology could allow startups to fret less about their backend and focus more on their unique value proposition. “Now they don’t have to reinvent the wheel” Vaidya tells me. “A lot of companies facing this scaling problem end up solving it badly in-house and now there’s a way to solve that problem by using us to help.”
PlanetScale quietly raised a $3 million seed round in April, led by SignalFire and joined by a who’s who of engineering luminaries. They include YouTube co-founder and CTO Steve Chen, Quora CEO and former Facebook CTO Adam D’Angelo, former Dropbox CTO Aditya Agarwal, PayPal and Affirm co-founder Max Levchin, MuleSoft co-founder and CTO Ross Mason, Google director of engineering Parisa Tabriz and Facebook’s first female engineer and South Park Commons founder Ruchi Sanghvi. If anyone could foresee the need for Vitess implementation services, it’s these leaders, who’ve dealt with scaling headaches at tech’s top companies.
But how can a scrappy startup challenge the tech juggernauts for cloud supremacy? First, by actually working with them. The PlanetScale beta that’s now launching lets companies spin up Vitess clusters on its database-as-a-service, their own through a licensing deal, or on AWS with Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure coming shortly. Once these integrations with the tech giants are established, PlanetScale clients can use it as an interface for a multi-cloud setup where they could keep their data master copies on AWS US-West with replicas on Google Cloud in Ireland and elsewhere. That protects companies from becoming dependent on one provider and then getting stuck with price hikes or service problems.
PlanetScale also promises to uphold the principles that undergirded Vitess. “It’s our value that we will keep everything in the query pack completely open source so none of our customers ever have to worry about lock-in” Vaidya says.
PlanetScale co-founders (from left): Jiten Vaidya and Sugu Sougoumarane
Battle-tested, YouTube-approved
He and Sougoumarane met 25 years ago while at Indian Institute of Technology Bombay. Back in 1993 they worked at pioneering database company Informix together before it flamed out. Sougoumarane was eventually hired by Elon Musk as an early engineer for X.com before it got acquired by PayPal, and then left for YouTube. Vaidya was working at Google and the pair were reunited when it bought YouTube and Sougoumarane pulled him on to the team.
“YouTube was growing really quickly and the relationship database they were using with MySQL was sort of falling apart at the seams,” Vaidya recalls. Adding more CPU and memory to the database infra wasn’t cutting it, so the team created Vitess. The horizontal scaling sharding middleware for MySQL let users segment their database to reduce memory usage while still being able to rapidly run operations. YouTube has smoothly ridden that infrastructure to 1.8 billion users ever since.
“Sugu and Mike Solomon invented and made Vitess open source right from the beginning since 2010 because they knew the scaling problem wasn’t just for YouTube, and they’ll be at other companies five or 10 years later trying to solve the same problem,” Vaidya explains. That proved true, and now top apps like Square and HubSpot run entirely on Vitess, with Slack now 30 percent onboard.
Vaidya left YouTube in 2012 and became the lead engineer at Endorse, which got acquired by Dropbox, where he worked for four years. But in the meantime, the engineering community strayed toward MongoDB-style non-relational databases, which Vaidya considers inferior. He sees indexing issues and says that if the system hiccups during an operation, data can become inconsistent — a big problem for banking and commerce apps. “We think horizontally scaled relationship databases are more elegant and are something enterprises really need.
Database legends reunite
Fed up with the engineering heresy, a year ago Vaidya committed to creating PlanetScale. It’s composed of four core offerings: professional training in Vitess, on-demand support for open-source Vitess users, Vitess database-as-a-service on PlanetScale’s servers and software licensing for clients that want to run Vitess on premises or through other cloud providers. It lets companies re-shard their databases on the fly to relocate user data to comply with regulations like GDPR, safely migrate from other systems without major codebase changes, make on-demand changes and run on Kubernetes.
The PlanetScale team
PlanetScale’s customers now include Indonesian e-commerce giant Bukalapak, and it’s helping Booking.com, GitHub and New Relic migrate to open-source Vitess. Growth is suddenly ramping up due to inbound inquiries. Last month around when Square Cash became the No. 1 app, its engineering team published a blog post extolling the virtues of Vitess. Now everyone’s seeking help with Vitess sharding, and PlanetScale is waiting with open arms. “Jiten and Sugu are legends and know firsthand what companies require to be successful in this booming data landscape,” says Ilya Kirnos, founding partner and CTO of SignalFire.
The big cloud providers are trying to adapt to the relational database trend, with Google’s Cloud Spanner and Cloud SQL, and Amazon’s AWS SQL and AWS Aurora. Their huge networks and marketing war chests could pose a threat. But Vaidya insists that while it might be easy to get data into these systems, it can be a pain to get it out. PlanetScale is designed to give them freedom of optionality through its multi-cloud functionality so their eggs aren’t all in one basket.
Finding product market fit is tough enough. Trying to suddenly scale a popular app while also dealing with all the other challenges of growing a company can drive founders crazy. But if it’s good enough for YouTube, startups can trust PlanetScale to make databases one less thing they have to worry about.
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YouTube Music turns its Top Charts into playlists
Earlier this year, Apple Music launched some of its top charts as playlist series. Today, YouTube is doing something similar. The company announced it’s making its YouTube Charts available as playlists in YouTube Music to users across the 29 markets where the music service is live. Each market will receive five of these “charts playlists” — three specific to their country, and two global lists, the company says.
The Top 100 Songs and the Top 100 Music Videos will be offered both as local and global playlists, while the Top 20 Trending Songs will be offered as a local playlist.
This latter playlist is updated several times per day in order to offer a real-time view into current music trends in a specific country. It’s also the first “dedicated external signal of the country’s most-viewed new music on the YouTube platform,” Google explained in a blog post this afternoon.
The other Top 100 Songs and Music Video charts are calculated differently and updated less often. The Top Songs is based on the overall performance of a song on YouTube by view count, which includes counting all the official versions of a song — meaning, the official music video, the user-generated content that uses the official song and lyric videos.
The Top Songs chart is updated weekly, according to YouTube’s documentation on how the charts are calculated.
The Top 100 Music Videos ranks the official music videos by view count in the previous week. It’s also updated weekly.
By comparison, YouTube Music’s Top Songs and Music Videos charts seem to have the potential to be more stale than those on rival services. For example, when Apple announced its Top 100 Songs chart would be available both as global and local playlists, it said it would update them daily at 12 AM PT based on Apple Music streams. Spotify’s top charts are also available both as daily and weekly charts.
“The charts, currently topped globally by Ariana Grande’s ‘thank u, next,‘ are the most accurate reflection of what’s happening in music culture and based purely on the number of views from more than 1 billion global music fans on YouTube each month,” noted the post, which does speak to YouTube Music’s strength.
Apple Music and Spotify are both fighting to break into the triple-digit millions in terms of paying customers, while Spotify is nearing 200 million total actives. But YouTube has a billion-plus users from which to generate its data. That’s not insignificant.
The new charts-turned-playlists are now available in the YouTube Music app. The playlists will appear on users’ home screens and be surfaced through search, says YouTube.
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YouTube rolls out autoplaying (but silent) videos on its mobile app’s homepage
YouTube on Monday announced a significant change to its mobile app — it will now autoplay videos by default when users are browsing the app’s home page, aka the “Home” tab. Fortunately, the videos will not autoplay with the sound enabled, the company says. Instead, the feature is meant to give users a preview of the video while scrolling through the Home section, so they can better decide if it’s something they want to watch.
The feature, which YouTube calls “Autoplay on Home,” is enabled by default. However, the app will introduce settings that will allow users to control their experience. Users can opt to turn the feature off entirely, if they choose, or they can opt to have autoplay only enabled when they’re connected to a Wi-Fi network.
Autoplay for Home is not an entirely new feature. It’s actually been up-and-running for over half a year for YouTube Premium members on Android. Premium is YouTube’s subscription offering, which removes the ads from YouTube while also offering other perks like downloads for offline access to videos, background play and access to YouTube Music and YouTube Originals.
Starting this week, Autoplay on Home is rolling out beyond Premium subscribers to all those who use the YouTube app on iOS and Android. As with most launches across YouTube, it’s a staged rollout — meaning you may not see autoplay immediately. YouTube says it will take a few weeks for the rollout to complete.
The company notes it made the decision to expand autoplay because it increases users’ engagement time with videos.
As YouTube explains in an announcement on its product forum (spotted first by Tubefilter): “previewing videos helps you make more informed decisions about whether you want to watch a video, leading to longer engagement with videos you choose to watch.”
The company also detailed its decision further in a YouTube Help video (embedded below) where it noted that autoplay’s launch doesn’t mean thumbnails are going away. Instead, YouTube will display the thumbnail first during a brief pause before the video begins to autoplay.
With the launch of autoplay, YouTube also noted that captions would become more important.
Today, the number of videos with captions enabled tops 2 billion, it said. The site offers a variety of options for captions, including automated captions (which aren’t always perfect), creator-uploaded captions and crowdsourced community captions.
It’s not surprising to see YouTube adopt autoplay, given that rivals, including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and others already do the same, as do some streaming services, like Netflix.
User reaction, following YouTube’s announcement on Twitter, has been mixed. Some people said they were looking forward to the feature, while others lamented that it’s now just another setting they have to turn off.
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YouTube rolls out Stories to creators with over 10K subscribers
A year ago, YouTube launched its own take on Stories, with the addition of a new short-form video format called Reels. The feature, which was rebranded as “YouTube Stories” at last year’s VidCon, was initially available only to select YouTube creators. But in June, YouTube said it would later in the year expand Stories to all creators with more than 10,000 subscribers. Today, it has done just that.
Now, YouTube is beginning to roll out Stories to a wider set of creators, giving them access to the new creation tools that include the ability to decorate the videos with text, stickers, filters and more.
The feature is very much inspired by rival social apps like Snapchat and Instagram — except that, in YouTube’s case, Stories disappear after 7 days, not 24 hours.
The idea behind YouTube Stories is to give creators an easy way to engage with their fans in-between their more polished and produced videos. Today’s creators are no longer simply turning a camera on and vlogging — they’re creating professional content that requires editing and a lot of work before publication, for the most part.
Stories let YouTube’s creators engage with fans in-between videos or while on the go, offering behind-the-scenes access to their creation process, updates, sneak peeks at upcoming videos and more.
Some early adopters of the format include FashionByAlly, Colin and Samir, DR Oficial, ChannelFrederator and Cassandra Bankson. The test group before today was small, and only included creators with more than 70,000 subscribers, we understand.
Once enabled, YouTube creators can film a new Story by opening the YouTube app, tapping on the video camera icon, then selecting “Create Story.”
Also new today is the ability for fans to comment on the Stories.
Viewers can “thumbs up” and “thumbs down” comments and “heart” comments, as well. The same comment moderation tools that are available on YouTube’s video uploads are also available on Stories, the company says. Plus, creators can choose to respond directly to fans’ comments with photos or videos that the whole community can see.
During the week they’re live, YouTube Stories will show up to subscribers on the Subscriptions tab and non-subscribers on Home and in the Up Next list below videos.
Many YouTube creators point their fans to their Instagram for their short-form content and behind-the-scenes action — something that YouTube likely hopes to stem with its launch of Stories.
Today’s expansion brings Stories to a much wider group of creators than before, but YouTube hasn’t said if or when the feature will roll out to its entire user base.
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Quizlet hits 50M monthly users
Most students in the U.S. have used or at least heard of Quizlet, the website for creating digital flashcards.
The company leverages machine learning to predict in which areas its users need the most help and provides 300 million user-generated study decks, maps, charts and other tools for learning.
Roughly eight months after closing a $20 million financing, Quizlet chief executive officer Matthew Glotzbach has disclosed some notable feats for the emerging edtech: it’s reached 50 million monthly active users, up from 30 million one year ago, and though it’s not profitable yet, its revenue is growing 100 percent YoY.
As a result of its recent growth, the company is opening its first office outside of Silicon Valley, in Denver.
“We by no means feel like our work is done; 50 million is a very small fraction of the 1.4 billion students on the planet,” Glotzbach told TechCrunch. “Our focus is growing the platform. If we continue to be successful in that mission, we will be the largest study and learning brand.”
The company has been around for a while. Founded in 2005 by then 15-year-old Andrew Sutherland, Quizlet was fully bootstrapped until 2015.
Its growth really began when Glotzbach, a seasoned executive most recently at YouTube, took the reigns in 2016. The $20 million round earlier this year, its largest yet, has allowed the company to blossom, too. Led by Icon Ventures, with participation from Union Square Ventures, Costanoa Ventures and others, it brought Quizlet’s total raised to just over $30 million.
Part of its growth, according to Glotzbach, has to do with its recent focus on its international users. The site has always been accessible around the world, but not until late 2016 did Quizlet begin offering the tool in other languages. Today, it’s available in more than 15 languages, a number the company is actively working to expand.
Newly added capabilities have also contributed to recent spikes in MAUs. Students can now access diagram-based content, which is helpful for STEM subjects, an area the company has historically been less helpful with.
Quizlet operates a freemium model but has three subscription products for power users. At $12 per year, Quizlet Go has no ads and provides an offline studying option on mobile. Quizlet Plus, at $20 per year, also provides an ad-free study experience, as well as image uploading and voice recording capabilities. Finally, Quizlet for Teachers offers educators a $35 per year option that lets them create their own decks for students and access to additional data, analytics and reporting.
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YouTube is closing the gap with Twitch on live streaming, report finds
Twitch continues to dominate the live streaming market, with approximately 2.5 billion hours watched by viewers in the third quarter of 2018, according to a new industry report out this morning. While YouTube still trails, it’s begun to close the gap with Twitch, it appears. YouTube’s live streaming platform, YouTube Live, started the year with 15 percent of the overall live streaming market’s viewership, but by September 2018, it had grown to roughly 25 percent of all live streaming hours viewed.
These findings, and more, were the subject of a “state of the industry” report released today by StreamElements, which also dug into what’s making these live streaming sites tick.
Of course, Twitch is still the market leader, with around 750 million monthly viewers, on average, who watched over 813 million hours in September. YouTube Live, by comparison, saw over 226 million hours that month, and Microsoft’s Mixer saw just 13+ million.
Also of note is that Twitch’s growth is now coming from the long tail, the report claims. Its top 100 channels haven’t grown much since the beginning of the year – in fact, they’re down a bit, according to the findings. In January 2018, viewers watch around 262 million hours on the top 100, which dropped to 254 million in September.
In addition, Twitch is growing viewership thanks to its expanded focus outside of gaming content. IRL streaming – meaning, watching creators “in real life” going about their day, vlogging, or participating in other activities, for example – is now one of the site’s most consistently growing categories, with 41 million more hours watched in Q3 2018 than in Q1.
This growth likely impacted Twitch’s recent decision to do away with the overarching “IRL” category to instead break down the content into subcategories like music, food & drink, ASMR, beauty, and more, and other organizational changes to its site.
StreamElements also claims that game streams and other content – but not the competitions known as “esports” – are what’s attracting viewers.
Esports viewership now makes up 9 to 17 percent of overall Twitch viewership, the report says. (This is consistent with findings Newzoo has reported in past years, as well.)
The report’s data, however, is not first-party – it comes from StreamElements’ position as a production and community management solutions provider for live streamers, which allows it some insight into live streaming trends. The company also partnered with streaming analysts StreamHatchet to compile this report, it says.
That being said, it’s not the only one to point to YouTube’s more recent growth. In StreamLabs’ Q2 report this year, it also found that YouTube’s live gaming streams were on the rise, as was viewership. But StreamLabs tends to look at concurrent streams and viewership, so it’s not a direct comparison.
YouTube recently did away with its standalone YouTube Gaming app, and incorporated gaming content more directly into its main site. This could impact its future growth even more than is reflected in this Q3-focused report.
Finally, the report also found that Fortnite’s popularity may have peaked – it’s still the most watched game on Twitch, but since reaching over 151 million hours watched in July, it’s been shedding viewers. The game saw 20 million fewer hours viewed in August, then dropped by another 25 million hours in September.
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YouTuber creates concept video showing Fortnite in first-person mode
Fortnite Battle Royale was undoubtedly the big game of 2017, and 2018 is shaping up to be very similar. And with such popularity inevitably comes a swath of critics.
Take, for example, YouTuber Max Box. Using Fortnite’s replay mode, Max Box created a YouTube video that shows what Fortnite would look like in first-person mode.
The video is slightly buggy, but it’s about as close as we may ever get to seeing what Fortnite would look like in first person.
As it stands now, Fortnite uses third-person view, showing the player a view of themselves and the rest of the world from the perspective of their character’s right shoulder. Because of these mechanics, players are able to peek over cover or around walls without exposing themselves to incoming fire.
Because third-person view allows gamers to see their character in full, it also makes Epic’s main Fortnite revenue generator, premium skins and emotes, all the more valuable.
For those reasons, it seems unlikely that Epic would introduce a first-person mode.
That said, Epic will face new competition in the Battle Royale space with the introduction of CoD: Black Ops 4 Blackout mode on October 12. The game jumps in the ring with Fortnite, PUBG and H1Z1 as a first-person Battle Royale shooter.
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