Aream & Co: M&A activity dropped to $500m in Q4 2025

A new report from investment bank Aream & Co shows that there was just $500 million in video games M&A activity in the final quarter of 2025, an 89% drop year-on-year.

The company’s Video Game Market Update for Q4 shows that mergers and acquisition activity dropped to its lowest level of the year in the period, something the firm attributes to a “pivot toward smaller targets”.

There were 39 deals during the period, a 34% increase year-on-year. Much of this activity came from Asian publishers, such as NCSoft’s $104 million acquisition of Indygo Group and Kakao snapping up the remainder of Kakao VX at a $114 million valuation.

Tencent’s $1.25 billion “strategic investment” in French publishing giant Ubisoft and Coffee Stain being spun out of Embracer Group at a $616 million market cap drove $1.7 billion in public marketing financing for the quarter.

Private investment, meanwhile, rose 29% to $900 million across 102 deals, though this cash has primarily been used to fund game tech companies, and mobile games studios in Turkey, such as Grand and Good Job.

Despite funding and investment slowing down in recent years, large diversified games firms, such as Sony, Take-Two, Nintendo and Tencent, are sitting on around $111.8 billion in deployable capital, as of Q3 2025. Asian mobile-focused companies, meanwhile, have $9.5 billion.

Investment at the pre-seed and seed funding stage hit $200 million for Q4, a 9% increase year-on-year, while Series A dropped 32% to $200 million.

Looking at the broader games market, PC saw a 20% increase in revenue year-on-year, something Aream & Co credits to a mix of established franchises, such as Battlefield 6, and new IP in Arc Raiders. Console revenue was up 13% year-on-year driven by third-parties.

Meanwhile, mobile games in-app spending hit $20.7 billion for the period. This was driven by optimised monetisation rather than an increase in downloads. Asian and Turkish games firms “significantly outperformed” their peers in the market.

Finally, payouts on Roblox rose 41% to hit $1.3 billion, something Aream & Co claims shows the “growing importance of UGC”.