Games industry M&A hit $6.6bn in Q1 2025 with mobile domination led by Scopely

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Games industry M&A hit $6.6 billion in Q1 2025 as Scopely splashed out $3.5bn on Niantic’s games business, according to a new report.

That’s according to Aream & Co.’s new Video Game Market Update report. The first edition in a new quarterly series, the research leveraged InvestGame’s data on mobile, PC and console from the last quarter.

The report noted that mobile continued to dominate quarterly M&A deals, accounting for the majority of the $6.6bn figure. Despite private financing remaining a challenge, deals were driven by private consolidators pursuing acquisitions and companies reshaping portfolios.

That $6.6bn also exceeded pre-pandemic quarterly figures, with M&A value reaching its highest level in the past two years. In fact, it more than doubled Q1 2024’s $3.2bn M&A figure.

2025’s big first quarter was naturally driven by Scopely’s planned $3.5bn acquisition of Niantic’s licenced games portfolio, which includes Pokémon Go, Monster Hunter Now and Pikmin Bloom. Without this deal, the quarter’s M&A value would have fallen slightly YoY.

Miniclip’s $1.2bn Easybrain acquisition was the second-largest in the games industry last quarter.

2025 well underway

Mobile’s small growth in revenue during Q1 was said to have been driven by Asian publishers’ strong results.

Singapore-based Habby, Turkish studio Dream Games and Hong Kong-based Florere were the top-growing games publishers in the US market quarter-over-quarter. South Korean company Devsisters and Singapore’s FunFly rounded out the top five.

Q1 2025 also saw Steam achieve a record quarter for concurrent users on PC, while console had a “steady” performance. Following the full unveiling of the Nintendo Switch 2, and with GTA 6 still expected sometime this year, Aream & Co. suggested that the remainder of 2025 will go on to be a “defining year” for console hardware and software.

The full report contains further insights into each platform’s Q1 performance, including valuation dispersion. It also noted that just 9% of 2024’s mobile games revenue was earned by new releases, versus 64% by titles that were at least four years old.