The IPO-palooza is over… IPOs slowed to a trickle this quarter: there was a 25-day span without a single one. That's a stark contrast to last year, when 1K+ companies raised a record $268B. Part of the reason private giants like Stripe are holding off: 70% of last year’s IPOs ended the year trading below their offering prices. Even Rivian, the first-to-market EV-truck maker with last year’s biggest debut, has slipped 50% since IPO’ing. Instacart and others have canceled planned IPOs, and the rest of the year’s expected to stay slow.
Ready Player (Every) One… US consumers spent $60B on video games last year — twice as much as they spent on streaming movies and TV. Gaming deals hit a new high score this quarter: “GTA” maker Take-Two revealed plans to buy Farmville maker Zynga for $12.7B in the biggest gaming deal of all time — until Microsoft beat that a week later with a $70B bid to buy “Call of Duty” maker Activision. Now gaming’s entering a new phase: the metaverse. Tech giants Meta and Nvidia are spending billions building metaverses, and gaming platforms like Roblox could be crucial to snagging early meta-users.
Moderation mayhem… Tech has been in the moderation hot seat, from the usual suspects (Meta, Twitter) to Spotify and TikTok. Joe Rogan created a Spotifiasco when medical experts and Neil Young called out Covid misinfo on his Spotify-exclusive pod. Rogan’s history of using racial slurs also surfaced. Spotify stood by Earth’s biggest podcaster, but made its moderation policies public for the first time. Others like TikTok and Twitter have had to deal with multiplying misinfo about Russia’s war in Ukraine. And Meta allowed users to call for violence against Russian invaders.