Half of investment money is being ploughed into AI, says Goodbody technology and video gaming analyst Patrick O’Donnell.
Speaking at the Games Growth Summit on a panel about the latest investor trends, The Games Angels founder Nick Button-Brown asked panelists O’Donnell and JKL Capital director of investment Peter Tsang what investors are looking for right now.
O’Donnell said AI tools were a big focus for investors. He highlighted recent large raises from the likes of Bitkraft and Andreessen Horowitz as examples of investment money going into the tech.
Outside of AI, O’Donnell said user-generated content was an interesting area for investors, as was 3D character creation.
Ultimately, he said, the most reliable area for investment was strong teams with experience.
Cypto’s burst bubble
Tsang said that JKL Ventures is not currently looking at crypto gaming investments. The web 3 and blockchain space attracted a flurry of investments a few years ago, but suffered from a crypto crash.
This year, the crypto hmarket has started to rise again while there are some renewed investments in the web3 space. But Tsang isn’t convinced.
“I think that 2021/2022 bubble has burst,” he stated.
Tsangsaid he’d seen lots of money flowing into educational games and edtech space, as well as tools to help people develop games faster, such as AI tech.
Tsang said when looking at what companies to invest in, he looks at whether they are targetting a niche market – rather than a highly competitive mass market – what its KPIs are and whether it can hit them, and the team itself.
