My son is a senior in high school. He is an athlete…
At age 14, he became an East Coast champion surfer. And today, he is the center midfielder on his high school soccer team – which just won the county championship for the year.
Instead, he went downstairs to play video games online with his friends.
Let me state that again: On the night of the college football national championship, my son chose to play video games instead of watching the big game.
One of the guys he was playing online with was the captain of his high school football team.
It was a not-so-subtle message that times are changing…
I grew up watching sports on TV with my dad. Generations of boys did the same thing. But that’s not the case anymore. In fact, if my son is any indication (and I believe he is), the times have ALREADY changed.
This shift won’t just change the fabric of our lives. It has big investment implications, too. And you might be surprised to hear this… but the winner of the transformation is not the U.S.
Let me explain…
The Super Bowl happened just a few weeks ago. The game had the lowest viewership since 2008.
That’s at least partially because the younger generation doesn’t care like they used to. And if you ask kids my son’s age, the “real” Super Bowl was months prior – when the League of Legends World Championship aired online…
The 2018 event broke every record in the book for viewership of a gaming event. At peak attendance, the League of Legends World Championship had 200 million concurrent viewers worldwide. That broke the 2017 record. And it was double the number of people who watched the Super Bowl this month.
These numbers get so large because gaming has a global reach. It’s big in the U.S., but it’s also big in other countries… And it’s huge in China.
A Chinese team won the 2018 League of Legends World Championship. It was China’s first victory in a gaming championship, but it likely won’t be the last.
That’s because in many ways, China is the global center of gaming.
Consider another of gaming’s largest events – The International 2018…
The game in this event is Dota 2. Like League of Legends, it’s another battle game. The 2018 championship took place in Vancouver, Canada, in August. Viewership was astounding, with an average of 4 million concurrent viewers during the event. But here’s what’s interesting…
A whopping 87% of those viewers were Chinese. And similarly, the Chinese accounted for 87% of total time spent watching the event.
This was such a Chinese-centric event – from a viewership perspective – that the data is broken into China and everyone else.
And in case you were wondering, the 2019 tournament will be held outside North America for the first time ever… in Shanghai.
So while my son and his friends are into gaming in a way my generation wasn’t, the U.S. is still behind. China is the global hub of competitive gaming. And it has also become the hub of game publishing…
Chinese companies now own many of the hottest games in the world. Fortnite – a game that my son is addicted to – comes from a Chinese company. So does League of Legends. Both games get roughly 80 million players per month.
You can’t survey the global gaming landscape without centering your sights on China. That wasn’t true a decade ago. But it’s the reality we live in today.
Longtime readers know I’ve been bullish on the Chinese markets for years. Until recently, the gaming revolution hasn’t been a big part of that story… But it is now.
Most folks in the U.S. don’t want to hear this… But it’s simply unwise to ignore China in the years to come.
Gaming is one more massive global trend that China is leading. It’s one more reason Chinese stocks could soar from here… And you need to get on board.
Good investing,
Steve
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Source: Daily Wealth