How to Win With Game Stocks

In one of the most volatile episodes in stock market history, investors early last year took the shares of a company called GameStop on a wild ride that few would have expected for a business that’s mostly a brick-andmortar antique, the gaming version of a chain of video stores.

- James K. Glassman

Its shares went on an adventure that echoed the characteristics of the video games on its shelves: fantasy, violence and a romantic quest for justice and vengeance.

In real life, however, GameStop has had a lousy year, losing money once again. But the rest of the gaming sector has taken up the mantle. It’s booming, becoming the backbone of the metaverse, a three-dimensional online environment that is likely the “next big thing” in consumer technology. In 2020, partly because the pandemic kept Americans indoors, gaming revenues exceeded those of movies and sports events combined. Global gaming sales in 2021 are estimated at $178 billion and projected to rise to $269 billion by 2025. According to the consulting firm Accenture, one out of every three people in the world is a gamer.

No wonder so many big tech players are investing in the business. In 2000, MICROSOFT (SYMBOL MSFT, $306) launched the game-playing console Xbox, and in 2014 the company bought Minecraft, a survival-themed game, for $2.5 billion; Minecraft now has 131 million active monthly users. In January, Microsoft announced that, pending regulatory approval, it will spend $69 billion to purchase ActivisionBlizzard, which has 400 million gamers a month playing such popular titles as Call of Duty and World of Warcraft. Trying to stay abreast, Sony Group, maker of the wildly popular PlayStation console, announced January 31 that it was buying Bungie, the private developer of the Halo and Destiny franchises, for $3.6 billion. (Stocks I like are in bold; share data are as of February 4.)