Paul Heydon at London Venture Partners has published a blog post today suggesting that Europe is the best place to invest in games because European game companies have proven to be the most valuable in the world in the last three years, according to IPOs and acquisition deals.
If Heydon’s firm sounds familiar to you, it’s because London Venture Partners has invested in a number of notable game companies in the past few years, including Clash of Clans developer Supercell and CSR Racing developer NaturalMotion.
While the company is based in Europe and Hayden cops to having a blatant European bias (after five years in business LVP invested in its first American games company just this summer, pouring $4.5 million into Stonehearth developer Radiant), the figures he provides are worth looking at because they showcase how outsized European game company deals have been in the past three years compared to those in Asia and North America.
Heydon claims that if you tally up all game company IPOs and acquisitions worth $50 million or more between October of 2012 and 2015 (figures below), Europe beats out Asia by 22 percent and North America by a whopping 400 percent.
He cites four big deals as critical to Europe’s top earner status: the King IPO, Softbank’s acquisition of Supercell, Zynga’s acquisition of NaturalMotion and Microsoft’s purchase of Mojang. At least three of those four deals saw large amounts of wealth flowing from Asia and North America into European coffers.
