Published , by Chris Jarrard
Published , by Chris Jarrard
Video games are an incredibly diverse art form. Titles like Her Story and Call of Duty: Black Ops - Cold War both fall under the category of video game, yet the two could not be more different from one another. If you wanted to get a quick macro glance at the financial health of the video game industry, you could peek at the top-selling games of the month, but you wouldn’t get the whole story. Having a single blockbuster game eating up the majority of potential global revenue seems impressive, but might not be a reliable indicator of industry-wide health.
The folks over at TriplePoint PR have created the TriplePoint Video Game Index (GAMER), an indicator that collects market data from thirty-nine of the most representative global stocks in the video game industry. The total value of the index is weighted by the size of the company based on its free-floating market capitalization. This means that significant stock price movement from Activision Blizzard (ATVI) will have a more pronounced effect on the Index value than the same percentage of movement from a smaller firm such as Konami Holdings (KONMY).
The TriplePoint Video Game Index includes a number of the biggest players in the industry, though it omits some standout names for various reasons. The selection of companies in the Index is chosen because the overwhelming majority of their business is directly tied to the video game industry.
Console makers like Sony and Microsoft are not included because their video game-adjacent holdings and operations are only a part of their business. As the TriplePoint blog notes, both Sony and Microsoft are “more critical to the industry than the industry is to them.” Tencent also falls under the same exclusionary rules due to its sizable social media and merchant services business. Casino game operations and other gambling-adjacent businesses are omitted as well as companies with massive entertainment divisions that work alongside their video game enterprise, such as Disney.
The list of companies included in the TriplePoint Video Game Index are as follows:
| TriplePoint Video Game Index | |
|---|---|
| Activision Blizzard Inc | Netmarble Corp |
| Bandai Namco Holdings Inc | Nexon Co Ltd |
| Capcom | Nintendo Co Ltd |
| CD PROJEKT RED SA | Paradox Interactive AB |
| Com2uS Corp | PearlAbyss Corp |
| Corsair Gaming, Inc. | Perfect World Co Ltd A |
| Cyber Agent Ltd | Playtika |
| DeNA Co | Razer Inc |
| Electronic Arts | Roblox |
| Embracer Group AB – B shares | Rovio Entertainment Oyj |
| Gamania Digital Entertainment Co | Sega Sammy Holdings Inc |
| GameStop Corp A | Square Enix Holdings Co Ltd |
| Glu Mobile Inc | Stillfront Group AB |
| Gravity Co. Ltd. ADR | Take-Two Interactive Software |
| Gree Inc | tinyBuild |
| GungHo Online Entertainment | Ubisoft Entertainment SA |
| Koei Tecmo Holdings Co Ltd | Unity Software Inc. |
| Konami Holdings | Wuhu Shunrong Sanqi Interactive |
| NCsoft Corp | Zynga Inc. A |
The TriplePoint Video Game Index is calculated by S&P Dow Jones Indices. S&P does a calculation of the real-time value of the index every fifteen seconds during United States market hours and distributes that information to a variety of services. The ticker symbol on wire services to see and track this information is GAMER.
There is currently no way to invest in the TriplePoint Index directly at this time. This also applies to other listed indexes. Aspiring investors can, however, put money into Exchange Traded Funds (ETF) that include one or more of the companies listed in the TriplePoint Index. A prospective investor should carefully consider all potential investments beforehand, including research in these ETFs. Actively managed funds also come with their own specific weighting of their components and should not be directly compared to the TriplePoint Index.
At Shacknews, you can keep up with all the latest video game news as well as the occasional deep dive into the financial nuts and bolts of the industry at large.