Games industry investment heats up ahead of PGC and GDC

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One of the biggest weeks in the games industry calendar is about to hit: GDC week is upon us. And for those working in mobile, we’ve got our own Pocket Gamer Connects taking place in San Francisco on March 17th to 18th.

Naturally, ahead of the week there has been a series of announcements across the sector. Anecdotally, it feels like there’s more to say than last year, but no blockbuster industry-wide impactful announcements.

Yes we had Scopely’s $3.5 billion acquisition of Niantic’s games business this week, and there has been plenty of action in the alternative app store space recently, but I’m talking about something that will drive those long queues of previous conferences.

Ahead of next week, what there has been, though, is a whole series of investment news to report on. In one day alone we reported six articles related to funding.

Recent articles just from March include:

• Niantic Spatial spin-off nets $250m funding after Scopely acquisition
• Felicity Games raises $3m to boost Indian game publishing and global expansion
• Good Job Games secures $23m investment round
• PvX Partners secures $3.8m seed funding to scale games and consumer apps
• Monopoly World developer Reality Games raises $4.7m
• App distribution platform Applivery secures strategic investment from Supercell
• Liminal raises $5.8 million to empower player creativity using AI
• Tilting Point launches $150m UA fund to support game developers
• Military history animation studio Yarnhub plots games expansion with community-led investment
• Saudi Arabia's Lobah Game Studio secures $12 million investment
• Ex-Tripledot president forms Arcadia Gaming Advisors with $100m fund for mobile game companies
• Triple Tap Games secures $1.2m for hybridcasual puzzle games
• European Investment Fund pledges over $20m to boost Nordic game development
• Turkish studio Surpass Games secures $1.5m to “redefine" the hybridcasual puzzle genre

(In other news, I’ll be dusting off the thesaurus for alternatives to ‘secures’).

It feels like money is flowing back into the games industry. But what does the data say? I asked Josh Chapman, managing partner at VC firm Konvoy, which regularly publishes a quarterly report on industry investment.

"Our latest Konvoy Games Industry Quarterly Report noted a 12% increase in investment volume in Q4 compared to the previous quarter, as investors were most active at the early stage,” he said.

“While data for Q1 2025 is coming in April, we do expect that Q1 will show an uptick. There is a lot of investment activity around the trends of AI, wagering, and even some web3 deals are getting done. It’s worth noting that most gaming startups are financially healthier than they were a year ago, and there’s higher emphasis on hitting profitability and getting there faster.

“Looking to the rest of 2025, we believe it will be an active year for gaming investments (improving on 2024 levels) but not necessarily a blockbuster year for private funding as exit liquidity remains constrained.”

For more on industry investment trends and M&A, check out our podcast interview with Drake Star managing partner Michael Metzger.

It’s a good lead-in to GDC week. The games industry needs good news and it feels like over the past month there have been a few more positive stories along with the bad.

We’ll of course report back on the key trends and general mood of the industry next week. For those attending, we hope to see you at the show. For those not in San Francisco, keep an eye on PocketGamer.biz for the breaking news coming out of PGC and GDC.