LoL Worlds 22

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What's in this Lootbox?

• 😂 LoL Worlds

• 📦 Xbox Game Pass is Profitable?

• 💰 Playgig Scores a Seed Round

• 📷 Meme

😂 LoL Worlds

This past Saturday the League of Legends World Championship 2022 was held in San Francisco at the Chase Center with 18,000 fans in attendance for the finals.

Total prize pool of the LoL Worlds 2022 was $2,225,000 with the following breakdown:

• 1st Place: $486,500

• 2nd Place: $333,750

• 3rd & 4th Place: $178,000

The teams will also get a % based on their placement of the LoL Worlds Champions in-game skin set purchases (number not released until later).

This is a common monetization strategy of all top Esports events where fans/player actually fund a big portion of the prize pool via in-game purchases dedicated to the tournament.

While LoL is considered to some as the Super Bowl of gaming (to some), let's not forget about "The International 2022" Dota2 tournament that finished on Oct 30th 2022. The International had a base prize pool of $1.6M with a contributed prize pool (in-game purchases) of $17.3M.

Oh also Lil Nas X opened the tournament and wrote the Anthem for this years Lol Worlds 202. Watch it here.

📦 Xbox Game Pass is Profitable?

Xbox Game Pass is Xbox's "Netflix of gaming" product that offers both PC & Console packages. It costs $9.99/mo for 1 platform & $14.99/mo for both PC & Console access.

The service actually launched in 2017 but ramp up was slow until around... you guessed it... 2020.

Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer recently did an interview and mentioned Game Pass is already profitable and accounts for roughly 15% of their "content and services revenue". He went on to mention they are seeing strong growth on PC but the Xbox userbase is mostly saturated.

Xbox Game Pass launched early and executed well, but the gaming wars are just heating up. Sony has Playstation Plus, EA Play and Ubisoft+ are all offering similar products to monetize their entire IP libraries.

Right not Xbox has EA Play included in Game Pass but I'm curious if Sony, Xbox or someone else (Netflix, Apple, Disney?) will scoop up EA within the next 12 months.

EA has a market cap of $36.014B. Much higher than Epic Games' latest valuation but half price of Microsoft's Activision Blizzard acquisition.

💰 Playgig Scores a Seed Round

Playgig is a new cross-platform game studio that just raised $10.85M.

The studio was started January 2021 by Riot Games executive Bruno Schirch. Geez at this point just assume every new studio is started by an ex-Rioters squad.

Mystic Kingdoms is the studio's first game and is a team battler set in a fantasy world (sound familiar?). They plan to launch a pre-alpha in early 2023.

📷 Meme

Thanks for Reading :)

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