The gaming VC gold rush is over!

The gaming VC gold rush is over. Here’s what killed it.

2020-2022: VCs chased gaming deals with the frenzy of a land grab. Dozens of acquisitions. Teams raising millions on pitch decks alone.

2025: One or two acquisitions per year. Maybe.

The brutal reality? VCs are sitting on portfolios full of zombie gaming companies. They’re not dead, but they’re not alive either. Breaking even if lucky. Burning cash to stay afloat.

Why the shift?

The incumbents won. They can drop $50M on marketing without blinking. They’ll spend 3 years reviving a legacy IP because they have the patience and pockets for it.

Meanwhile, startups with $1-2M can’t even get noticed. The noise is too loud. The competition too fierce.

But here’s what really killed gaming VC:

Unpredictability.

In B2B SaaS, you solve a quantifiable problem. Show traction. Scale predictably.

In games? You might burn $5M and 2 years only to discover nobody wants to play. There’s no formula for fun.

The acquirers have vanished, too. Why buy when you can wait for startups to die and hire their talent directly?

What would bring gaming VC back?

A new platform. Something that gives startups and incumbents equal distribution. A genuine disruption to how games reach players.

Without that? The era of “ex-Supercell employee raises $5M seed round” is done.

Great teams with proven hits, which they built and shipped, will still get funded. But the bar has gone up from high jump to pole vault.

The gold rush is over. The gold standard has just begun.