The Candy Crush Saga logo displayed on a phone screen.
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Spending on mobile games declined last year as consumers got more frugal with their purchasing decisions in response to rising inflation, according to a report from app analytics firm Data.ai.
Mobile game spending fell 5% globally in 2022, to $110 billion, Data.ai, which was formerly known as App Annie, said in its “State of Mobile” report Wednesday. The report also looks at the broader state of sectors like mobile ads, retail and social media apps.
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Nevertheless, first-time installs of mobile titles rose 8% to a record 90 billion, with so-called “hypercasual” titles leading the gains.
“We are seeing this major theme emerge of people being more price sensitive and financially more conservative,” Lexi Sydow, head of insights at Data.ai, told CNBC, adding that the “biggest hit” to spending on apps was in gaming.
Faced with economic headwinds such as higher prices and borrowing costs, people are cutting back on discretionary purchases. Gaming especially has come under pressure.
Global sales of games and services, including console and PC games, were expected to contract 1.2% year-on-year to $188 billion in 2022, according to a July research note from market data firm Ampere Analysis.
In recent years, growth in mobile gaming has been the dominant story in the games industry, with major publishers making big bets on mobile game developers.
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Early last year, Take-Two bought mobile gaming firm Zynga for $12.7 billion. In 2016, the maker of Candy Crush Saga, King, was purchased by Activision Blizzard for $5.9 billion. U.S. tech giant Microsoft, meanwhile, is banking on continued growth in mobile gaming with its proposed $69 billion takeover of Activision Blizzard.
That growth has been challenged lately by a number of macroeconomic headwinds, however, including a rise in the cost of living and higher interest rates.
In 2020, Microsoft and Sony launched their respective next-generation gaming consoles, giving mobile more competition.
Last year also saw a return to in-person activities and a normalization of travel rules from the height of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, when much of the world was hunkering down at home.
Non-gaming apps proved more resilient in 2022, according to Data.ai’s research, with the value of purchases in such apps rising 6% year-over-year to $58 billion. The growth was driven mainly by subscriptions and in-app purchases in streaming platforms, dating apps and short-form video services like TikTok.
Downloads of non-gaming apps grew 13% from the previous year, to 165 billion.
That did little to offset the slump in mobile game spending, however, with spending across app stores slipping 2% to $167 billion. The figures include installs on third-party Android marketplaces in China, where Google’s official Play app store is banned.
The market faces further headwinds in 2023, with recently introduced privacy measures from Apple expected to place greater strain on app makers.
Apple launched its App Tracking Transparency feature, which gives users a prompt asking whether they wish to be targeted by advertisers, in 2021.
Data.ai expects global app spend on games specifically to drop a further 3% to $107 billion this year as a result of decreased disposable income and changes to privacy.
Google plans to adopt privacy curbs similar to Apple’s that would limit tracking across Android apps.
“With limitations on your targeting capabilities from an advertiser standpoint, it becomes harder to attract the big whales who spend the most in games,” Sydow explained.
The changes spell trouble for Meta, owner of the Facebook and Instagram social media platforms. Meta Chief Financial Officer David Wehner warned previously that Apple’s ATT could decrease its 2022 sales by $10 billion. The company made most of its $117.9 billion revenue in 2021 from advertising sales.
Meta faces tense competition from rival firm TikTok. The Chinese-owned short video app last year reached $6 billion in overall lifetime spending and is only the second non-game app to achieve that milestone after Tinder, according to Data.ai.
Sydow said the effects of Apple’s privacy measures hadn’t yet appeared in the 2022 numbers — with total spend dropping across both iOS and Google Play — but was likely to have a much greater impact this year.
Despite the overall spending slowdown in 2022, there was still “more demand for mobile service than ever before,” Sydow added. First-time app downloads grew 11% to 255 billion, Data.ai said, while hours spent in apps climbed 9% to a record 4.1 trillion.
CoreWeave shares sank 13% on Tuesday after CEO Mike Intrator addressed delays at a third-party data center developer that hit full-year guidance in its latest earnings report.
“Quite frankly, every single part of this quarter went exactly as we planned, except for one delay at a singular data center,” Intrator told CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street” on Tuesday.
He then clarified that a “singular data center provider” is more accurate.
“Some people might think it’s one complex, but when I go over the numbers, we’re talking about multiple places,” CNBC’s Jim Cramer said. “And it just so happens that the places are all connected to an outfit called Core Scientific that you tried to buy.”
Cramer noted delays at complexes in Texas, Oklahoma and North Carolina.
Intrator said the companies have been working together on infrastructure for a long time a would continue work to bring it online. He did not directly confirm that Core Scientific is the third-party provider.
CoreWeave tried to acquire Core Scientific for $9 billion earlier this year. Core Scientific shareholders voted against the proposed deal. Core Scientific shares sank 7% Tuesday.
During CoreWeave’s quarterly earnings call on Monday, JPMorgan Securities analyst Mark Murphy asked if the delay was related to Core Scientific, but Intrator declined to name the company. At another point in the call, the CEO suggested that just one data center, not multiple sites, were affected.
“There was a problem at one data center that’s impacting us, but there are 41 data centers in our portfolio,” Intrator said.
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At a different point in the call, CoreWeave’s CFO Nitin Agrawal said the delays stem from “a single provider, data center provider partner.”
When reached for comment about how many sites were affected, CoreWeave did not provide a number and pointed to Intrator’s statements on the earnings call and during his “Squawk on the Street” interview.
CoreWeave, which provides infrastructure for artificial intelligence companies, reported third-quarter results on Monday that showed $1.36 billion in revenue for the period, up 134% from $583.9 million a year ago. But CoreWeave now sees 2025 revenue coming in between $5.05 billion and $5.15 billion, below the average analyst estimate of $5.29 billion.
Intrator told CNBC on Tuesday that CoreWeave has teams of employees working with contractors and Core Scientific at those sites “every single day” to get things back on track.
“It became apparent to us in Q3 that there were delays at the facility,” Intrator said. “CoreWeave responded by deploying our own boots on the ground to ensure that everything was being done in order to move those facilities along as quickly as possible.”
Intrator told analysts on Monday that the delays would not affect its backlog or get the full value from contracts.
Core Scientific did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
CoreWeave has been on a deal-making blitz as big tech companies and AI startups race to build out their computing infrastructure.
The company announced in September that it agreed to provide Meta with $14.2 billion of AI cloud infrastructure, just days after expanding its contract with OpenAI to $22.4 billion.
Every weekday the CNBC Investing Club with Jim Cramer holds a “Morning Meeting” livestream at 10:20 a.m. ET. Here’s a recap of Tuesday’s key moments. 1. The S & P 500 and Nasdaq were down Tuesday as Big Tech was pressured following CoreWeave’s quarterly results Monday evening. The AI infrastructure provider disappointed investors after lowering its revenue outlook. Shares of CoreWeave plunged around 14%. Regarding the broader AI trade, Jim said, “I’m getting antsy about the fact that there’s too much borrowed money now starting to go into the data center.” However, Jim is not currently advocating changes to the portfolio. Wall Street also focused on soft labor market data after ADP’s payroll tracker showed a weekly decline of 11,250 jobs on average for the four weeks ending Oct. 25. 2. Linde shares were up over 1% Tuesday after UBS upgraded the industrial gas giant to a buy from a hold-equivalent rating. The analysts, who cut their price target to $500 from $507, said that earnings-per-share growth in 2026 will be a positive catalyst for Linde. This is a reassuring call for the recently lagging Club holding. After all, Linde’s pricing power has allowed the company to deliver earnings beats quarter after quarter despite the macroeconomic backdrop. 3. Nvidia stock shed around 3% on Tuesday after SoftBank announced that it sold its entire stake in the chipmaker. Weakness among AI-related names didn’t help investor sentiment, either. The sale of Nvidia stock is a source of cash that will be used to fund SoftBank’s whopping $22.5 billion investment in OpenAI, CNBC reported Tuesday. The news doesn’t make us concerned about Nvidia. We maintain our “own, don’t trade” thesis on shares. Instead, it adds to our aforementioned caution around mounting debt from the AI data center boom. 4. Stocks covered in Tuesday’s rapid fire at the end of the video were: CoreWeave, Paramount Skydance , Amgen , Dutch Bros , and Coterra Energy. On Wednesday at 6:30 p.m. ET, Jim will be signing copies of his new book, “How to Make Money in Any Market,” at the Atlantic Avenue Barnes & Noble in Brooklyn. (Jim Cramer’s Charitable Trust is long NVDA, LIN. See here for a full list of the stocks.) As a subscriber to the CNBC Investing Club with Jim Cramer, you will receive a trade alert before Jim makes a trade. Jim waits 45 minutes after sending a trade alert before buying or selling a stock in his charitable trust’s portfolio. If Jim has talked about a stock on CNBC TV, he waits 72 hours after issuing the trade alert before executing the trade. THE ABOVE INVESTING CLUB INFORMATION IS SUBJECT TO OUR TERMS AND CONDITIONS AND PRIVACY POLICY , TOGETHER WITH OUR DISCLAIMER . NO FIDUCIARY OBLIGATION OR DUTY EXISTS, OR IS CREATED, BY VIRTUE OF YOUR RECEIPT OF ANY INFORMATION PROVIDED IN CONNECTION WITH THE INVESTING CLUB. NO SPECIFIC OUTCOME OR PROFIT IS GUARANTEED.
Rocket Lab‘s stock rose as much as 3% on Tuesday after the space company posted record revenues in the third-quarter as it scoops up more launch deals and builds its backlog.
The company, which makes satellites and rockets and provides launch services to its customers, on Monday reported revenue of $155 million for the period. That surpassed the $152 million forecast from analysts polled by LSEG, and it was up 48% from about $105 million a year ago. Rocket Lab also posted a smaller-than-expected loss of 3 cents per share, versus the 10-cent per share loss anticipated.
Additionally, Rocket Lab issued strong guidance for the current quarter, saying it expects revenues between $170 million and $180 million. Analysts had forecast $172 million in revenues.
Rocket Lab said it’s experiencing a record backlog, with 49 rocket launches on contract. The company said it signed 17 of those deals during the third quarter and plans to close out the year with over 20 launches.
In an earnings release, CEO Peter Beck said the Long Beach, California, company is “just days away” from reaching a new annual launch record. Rocket Lab is also tackling mergers and acquisitions that target key defense initiatives such as President Donald Trump’s missile defense system plan known as the ‘Golden Dome,” Beck added.
Competition is intensifying in the space technology sector as the U.S. government and NASA lean on more independent contractors, including Elon Musk‘s SpaceX, to power missions to return to the moon. Growing excitement has also brought a wave of space companies to the public markets this year, including Texas-based Firefly Aerospace.
Last month, Rocket Lab’s stock jumped more than 31% after announcing a slew of new launch deals. Shares have more than doubled this year and surged nearly 270% over the last twelve months. The stock has pulled back about 13% in November amid a broader market selloff.
During the third quarter, the company closed its acquisition of satellite sensor maker Geost and opened a new launch site for its Neutron rocket.
Rocket Lab reported an adjusted EBITDA loss of $26.3 million, topping the $21 million to $23 million loss range previously forecast. Analysts anticipated a $22.2 million adjusted EBITDA loss, according to FactSet.
The company expects adjusted EBITDA losses to range between $23 million and $29 million in the fourth quarter, surpassing the $13 million loss forecast by FactSet.