Gaming industry execs chime in on changing consumer habits and the the rise of AI in Q1 2023

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by Jacob Solomon May 29, 2023 News
Gaming industry execs chime in on changing consumer habits and the the rise of AI in Q1 2023

In the public market, this year is shaping up to be a significant one for the gaming industry. After a flurry of public offerings, publicly traded gaming companies are more valuable than ever. The gravy train will continue to choo-choo forward as games become a pillar of modern entertainment.

In anticipation of a mounting recession, brands and consumers limited their spending in the gaming industry. Following a wave of layoffs earlier this year, gaming companies have had to pivot into new business models and explore other cultural trends in order to keep investors happy in the first quarter of the fiscal year.

The round-up of executive commentary from the recent earnings reports of 12 of the largest publicly traded gaming and esports companies is listed in alphabetical order.

In a company announcement on April 26, Bobby Kotick said that Call of Duty was a key driver of growth and credited King for increasing in-game net bookings by 11 percent.

The earnings press release went out on the same day that the U.K.'s Competition was published.

The company would work aggressively with Microsoft to appeal.

According to Kenzo Tsujimoto, over 40% of the sales of his company in the last year were digital. As game developers shift to live service as a business model, these numbers are likely to increase even more.

Tsujimoto said that the adoption of digital sales on PC has allowed them to sell their games even in countries where dedicated game consoles are not available. In the previous year, we sold more than 300 different products in more than 200 countries and regions, with more than 40% of volume sold on the PC.

One of the most interesting tidbits from Corsair's earnings call on May 10 came in response to an analyst's question about the manufacturer's decision to step away from certain markets. Corsair focuses on the more expensive enthusiast market as a potential recession looms.

Andy Paul said that price points more in the $100 to $250 level tends to be more for pro-sumers.

As consumers spend more of their time hanging out and spending money inside social gaming platforms, the importance of titles like "FIFA" and "The Sims" has been highlighted. To build games tailored to massive online communities, create creator tools to help "amplify" those communities, and produce high-quality games and stories to keep them interested were all outlined by CEO Andrew P. Wilson to investors on May 9.

The social networks of the future will be games. A set of social and creator tools in and around our games are being innovated to amplify the power of community. The strategy is to help players make new friends.

Enthusiast is looking for a more cohesive identity. Enthusiast was clear on its call May 15 that it was looking to generate interest in investors by using artificial intelligence.

Nick Brien said that they were excited about being the largest independent player in the gaming media and entertainment industry. This will allow us to focus on the power of artificial intelligence for the benefit of our enthusiast communities, as well as the marketers who are partnering with us to create winning brand activations and engage in ad campaigns. Every relevant artificial intelligence tool will be tested to improve our sales, return on investment and user acquisition.

The company's outlook for the financial year has not changed despite some candid observations by the CEO on the earnings call.

Darrell said that most of the macroeconomic issues that impacted their fiscal year results continued. The central banks are raising rates to fight inflation and consumer confidence is low.

One of the companies that stands to benefit most from the recent flurry of interest in artificial intelligence is NVIDIA, and the CFO played this up in the company's May 24 earnings call.

Generative artificial intelligence is driving exponential growth in compute requirements and a fast transition to NVIDIA Accelerated Computing, which is the most versatile, most energy- efficient and the lowest-TCO approach to train and deploy it, according to the author. rative artificial intelligence drove significant upside and demand for our products.

On the May 10 earnings call, CEO David Baszucki talked about the upcoming roll out of the platform's new ad format.

There will be a small amount of advertising revenue in the second quarter. Baszucki said that the NFL shared that Portals helped them reach a high percentage of new users. There is a new ad format that meshes with image and video in a way that is native to Roblox.

During the company's May 17 earnings call, CEO Strauss Zelnick said that the acquisition of the mobile gaming giant was paying off. Take-Two's net bookings totaled $5.3 billion for the quarter, Zelnick said.

The rapid growth of the company's advertising revenue was highlighted by the "solid revenue growth" reported by the CEO. He paid lip service to artificial intelligence in the earnings report.

In order to better serve our users, customers and society at large, we're investing in our artificial intelligence capabilities and cloud infrastructure.

The CFO of the game developer said on May 16 that layoffs at the company wouldn't affect its projects.

It will be a combination of strict recruitment control and making sure that critical jobs are filled, as well as making for productions are well-staffed. We will pursue some targeted restructuring like we did a few months ago.

In the company's earnings report released on May 10, John S. Riccitiello mentioned that the company has sustainable competitive advantages in and around artificial intelligence.

The nature of our platform will benefit from artificial intelligence tools and content creation, and we are uniquely able to enable creators to make things where worlds come alive, or digital twins come alive.