The gaming industry

The tech tycoon, Google, enters the gaming industry by launching its gaming platform, Stadia. Unlike Sony's PlayStation and Microsoft's Xbox, Stadia is a cloud platform that allows players to play games from all kinds of devices including PCs, smartphones and tablets, without any strict requirement for high-end hardware. Google states that its digital platform is far more powerful than any console and allows game developers to develop games which require very high-end hardware and announces its partnership with AMD to provide GPU for games (the news pushed AMD's share price to rise over 10%). In addition, the platform will provide better speed and quality for game streaming.

In China, the gaming tycoon, Tencent, increases its investment in esports tournaments in China. The tournaments for its mobile game Honour of Kings, and PC game League of Legends can attract 80m online viewers per match. Even given the enormous population size, such number of audience is still amazing. Tencent has a longer history of being interested in game streaming comparing with Google. The company has already invested over $1bn into game streaming platforms Douyu and Huya, which are the largest game streaming platforms in China. More than half the world's esports fans are in Asia and China earned $163.1m revenues from esports while the US earned $344.3m. Given the size of esports fans in China, the Chinese market has great potential for companies to generate greater revenues from this industry.

Gaming is a way of entertainment and is also a relatively cheap (or at least manageable) way. The industry will suffer less volatility from the world economic performance, but in China is deeply affected by the regulation environment (Tencent's market price fell when the regulators freezed commerical video game licensing for nine months last year).