Playing for Profits

By Matthew Milner, on Wednesday, January 4, 2017

I saw the first Star Wars movie 40 years ago and got hooked instantly.

Ever since then, every few years or so, I wait in line to see the latest installment.

But over the holiday weekend, as I watched Rogue One, I started thinking about how much the movie industry has changed:

For the last 30 or 40 years, movies were the dominant form of paid Entertainment, bigger than Television, Music, or Books.

But now there’s a new leader in this sector…

And for early investors, it promises to deliver big gains.

Bigger Than the Movies

Hollywood movies bring in about $40 billion a year at the box office.

That’s a lot of money—but it’s dwarfed by a different sector of the Entertainment industry.

The fast-growing sector I’m referring to is expected to hit $102 billion this year. That makes it more than twice as big as the movie industry.

I’m talking, of course, about the vast market for Video Games.

A Multi-Billion Dollar Industry Comes of Age

In 1952, an American physicist named William Higinbotham designed the very first video game, Tennis for Two. (Higinbotham is more widely known as a member of the team that developed the first nuclear bomb.)

Twenty years later, in 1972, Atari released a video game called Pong. It became the first “blockbuster” coin-operated game, selling more than 70,000 units.

Then, in the late 70s, based on the success of Space Invaders and Asteroids, the video game market grew exponentially. It went from ~$300 million to ~$3 billion.

But it wasn’t until the Personal Computer and the Internet came along that gaming became truly mainstream.

Nowadays, more than 155 million people in the U.S. play video games, and their average age is 40.

And just like with a Hollywood movie, any company that produces a blockbuster can find itself with a “cash cow” on its hands.

For example, a game called World of Warcraft generated $8.5 billion. Another game, CrossFire, pulled in $6.8 billion.

By contrast, the top-grossing movie of all time is Avatar, which made $2.8 billion.

How you can you try to profit from this huge, fast-growing trend?

Let’s take a look…

Fun-Gi: A Mobile Gaming Company

With 68% of Americans owning a smartphone, the market for mobile “apps” has become huge. In fact, it’s expected to hit $77 billion this year.

And the largest category for these apps is Games.

Building a high-quality game certainly isn’t cheap, but marketing the game so people know about it can cost an absolute fortune.

Which is why a new gaming start-up called “fun-gi” is using an intriguing strategy:

It builds its games in conjunction with partners who already have big audiences, so the partners can help with marketing.

For example, fun-gi’s first partners are the stars of HGTV's most-watched show ever: Chip and Jo Gaines of "Fixer Upper."

“Fixer Upper,” a TV show where an attractive married couple turn run-down houses into beautiful showplaces, had 25 million viewers last season.

With fun-gi’s new mobile game, “House Flip,” it hopes to turn some of those viewers into gaming customers—and by letting users virtually redecorate a house, Chip and Jo hope to give fans a new way to interact with their furniture brand.

Fun-gi expects to release the game this month, and then it plans to release two additional games shortly thereafter.

That kind of aggressive growth should help it meet its goals—but it’s going to require plenty of money in the bank.

Which is why the company is raising capital today…

The Investment

Fun-gi is currently raising $1 million.

The minimum investment is $100, and anyone can invest in this deal, regardless of their income or net worth.

Your investment will buy you equity, so if fun-gi creates the next blockbuster video game franchise like World of Warcraft, you’ll get your share of the upside.

To be clear, I’m not recommending you run out and invest in fun-gi. This is a risky venture that requires substantial investment research…

So before you think about investing, make sure you do your homework! You can dig into the details of fun-gi here »

To put what I’m saying in perspective, we recently recommended a gaming start-up in our Private Market Profits research service. But before we made our official investment recommendation, we spent nearly two months doing research on it.

Private Market Profits is currently closed to new customers, so we can’t share that recommendation with you today. However, if you’d like to join the waiting list so you can learn about our next pick, click here to enter your email address »

Happy investing.

Please note: Crowdability has no relationship with fun-gi, or with any of the companies or platforms we write about. Crowdability is an independent provider of education, information and research on start-ups and alternative investments.

Best Regards,


Founder
Crowdability.com

Comments

If you enjoyed this article, subscribe to updates:

Sign-up today and you'll receive our daily insights on early-stage investing, as well as our FREE "Equity Crowdfunding Action Kit" – where you'll learn:

  • The Ins & Outs of Equity Crowdfunding
  • A step-by-step path to get started
  • Tips from dozens of Venture Capitalists
subscribe to updates

Thank you for subscribing!

Tags: Mobile gaming Video games

Share This:
comments powered by Disqus