Gaming in Seattle - Ninja Battles and Three Trends to Watch

In addition to cloud, ecommerce, and machine learning, Seattle is a major hub for gaming. There are more than 400 gaming companies here that generate $28B in annual revenue and create 23K jobs.

This includes large companies like Valve, Microsoft/Xbox, PopCap/EA, Big Fish, DoubleDown, Bungie, Niantic, Amazon Game Studios, Nintendo, Facebook Gaming, and Wizards of the Coast, as well as startups like Tiny Build, Rec Room, and Matcherino.

Last week, one of the big announcements in gaming world was that Ninja decided to stop streaming on Twitch (Amazon) and start streaming on Mixer (Microsoft) instead. Ninja probably makes $1M+ a month playing video games, so I’m sure it wasn’t cheap for Microsoft to bring him over to Mixer, which only accounts for 3% of the live streaming market (vs. Twitch at 72%).

One of the main reasons this backyard ninja battle is interesting is because the gaming market is massive. At $150B of annual revenue, gaming is more than 5x bigger than Netflix’s video streaming market, and each of the big tech companies is positioning themselves to capture a piece of it.

If you want to learn more about what’s happening in gaming, here’s a longer article I wrote on Geekwire on the three trends to watch in gaming right now.

‍