Mobile games driving $5B in mergers and acquisitions this year

Video game mergers and acquisitions have topped out at $5 billion U.S. so far this year thanks to strong investments and purchasing deals largely among mobile developers, says investment bank Digi-Capital. In a new report, Digi-Capital founder Tim Merel says that investments such as Soft Bank's recent $1.5 billion majority stake investment in Clash of Clans developer Supercell have gone some way in smashing analysts' projections. "When we anticipated a record for games [mergers and acquisitions] in 2013 two weeks ago in our Q3 2013 Global Games Investment review, we were not expecting that record within two weeks," says Merel. In addition to Soft Bank's Supercell investment, Ourpalm's recent acquisition of Chinese studios Playcrab and Shanggames also drove up the overall figure. Like in 2012, the bulk of the mergers and acquisitions came through the mobile games space, in particular the East Asian markets of China, Japan and South Korea. You can read the entire report from Digi-Capital here.