Mohammad bin Salman, Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince, made his country to acquire stakes in three major video game publishers. Recent SEC filings spotted by Bloomberg show that Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, which bin Salman chairs, purchased more than $3.3 billion worth of shares in Activision-Blizzard, EA and Take-Two.

Note that SA usually just execute US orders in this regard, and US needed fresh nice money this year and it also helped rising stock bubble.

It is real tragedy

The average U.S. consumer now has access to six different TV services, and is increasingly inclined to add more to ensure they can see the latest exclusive programming options. That’s according to Hub Entertainment Research’s annual Best Bundle study, which found consumers average 5.7 different services including OTT services, traditional pay-TV providers and over-the-air (OTA) broadcasts received via antennas.

The average number of TV service options climbed by one from a year ago, and has doubled since 2019.

The study also found four-fifths of TV consumers now use a streaming TV service. The number of viewers with traditional pay-TV services has declined by 7 percentage points from a year ago, while the number of viewers using any streaming service grew only 2 points over the same period.

Almost three-fifths of all TV consumers take two or more of the most popular subscription video on demand (SVoD) services, including Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu, Disney+ and HBO Max. The number of those with two or more of those services grew 8 percentage points, Hub found.

More on US streaming

Russians spend an average of 5 hours a day in front of digital devices on work tasks and 3 hours on personal matters. Most of the time behind the screens of digital devices is spent by residents of the Central Federal District (7 hours a day), young people 18-24 years old (8 hours each), people with higher education (7 hours each), managers (8 hours each).

Degradation will continue, prices will jump more

According to the US Department of Labor, Americans with incomes above $ 50,000 a year play tennis, football, or do yoga in their spare time. Those who are even richer play golf. But the poorest part of the population often spends their free time in front of the TV or computer, playing games, listening to music and watching movies. And it’s much more pleasant to sit in front of the TV with a packet of chips, a bottle of soda and, preferably, a large delicious pizza.

App Annie, a mobile data analytics platform, estimates that Russians spend an average of 4.3 hours daily on mobile apps. This is the eighth indicator out of sixteen countries analyzed. In the first place were residents of Indonesia, they spend 5.5 hours on their smartphones every day. The top three are Brazil with 5.4 hours of daily activity on smartphones and South Korea with 5 hours.

Smartphone is new TV, just content became even worse.

Mass media issues

Cable news networks were the main form of evening entertainment for millions of Americans last year. In 2021, weekday prime-time viewership dropped 38% at CNN, 34% at Fox News Channel and 25% at MSNBC, according to the Nielsen company.

The Trump era saw explosive subscriber growth for some digital news sites like The New York Times and Washington Post. Yet readers aren’t spending as much time there; Comscore said the number of unique visitors to the Post’s site was down 44% in November compared to November 2020, and down 34% at the Times.

A study by Boston Consulting Group showed that Russia is among the top five countries in terms of the volume of game content consumed, but lags far behind the leaders in terms of the pace of its creation. The top 5 also included China, the US, South Korea and Japan.

The volume of the global gaming market by the end of 2021 amounted to a record $175 billion and will continue to grow at the level of 10% per year, according to BCG analysts. During the pandemic, stocks in the gaming industry have risen from 22% to 39%, and gamers have increased their spending on games (in the US, this figure rose by 75%). The number of people who consider themselves gamers has reached 3 billion people.

The study found that the gaming and esports sectors are more than twice the global combined box office revenue of cinemas, the entire music streaming and album sales market, and the budget of the world's five richest sports leagues combined.

And all this sectors must be destroyed and rebuild much smaller from scratch, time spent on games must be totally limited, if society want to move forward.

Good news - no more games sales in Mordor

Over the past year, the video game market in Russia was estimated at $3.4 billion, while demonstrating constant growth. Most of the revenue was generated by mobile games ($1.4 billion), followed by PC games ($1.2 billion) and console games in third ($864 million). Additionally, some industry representatives have decided to cut themselves off from the Belarusian gaming market, which is estimated at $101 million.

A quarter of 3-year-olds in the UK have a social media profile. This is according to a 2021 survey of parents by the UK communications regulator Ofcom. Despite most social media sites setting their recommended minimum age at 13, as much as 80 percent of 12-year-olds have some kind of profile and, as our infographic illustrates, at no age from 3 onwards are the figures below one quarter of all children included in the survey.

In terms of specific platform use, Ofcom states: "Children aged 8-11 were more likely to have profiles on TikTok (34 percent) and YouTube (27 percent). TikTok in particular is growing in popularity, even among the youngest age groups; 16 percent of 3-4 year-olds and 29 percent of 5-7s use the platform." Overall, of all children aged 3 to 17, YouTube is the most popular service (89 percent use it). While for some, the video sharing platform may not be considered a traditional form of social media, TikTok certainly is, and attracted 50 percent of UK 3-17-year-olds in 2021.