The DeanBeat: What are the ingredients for the billion-dollar deals in gaming?

Why are we seeing some big deals in gaming this year? Amazon outbid Google to buy game livestreaming firm Twitch for $970 million. Zhongji, a Chinese holding company bought mobile game maker FunPlus games for $960 million. Microsoft bought Minecraft maker Mojang for $2.5 billion. And this week, Churchill Downs bought casual game maker Big Fish Games for up to $885 million.

These are the big game industry acquisitions, but the underlying trends are just as strong. Internet Dealbook found that the value of deals — combining both the acquisition values and game investment values — in the third quarter was up 6,120 percent from the third quarter of 2013. That was bigger than the value growth in most other tech businesses by far. The number of game acquisition and investment deals was up 56 percent in the third quarter, and the average deal value was $240 million, up from $7 million a year earlier. These acquisitions are begetting other big investments, like Alibaba’s $120 million investment in Kabam or the recent VC investment of $35 million into mobile game publisher Scopely. The VCs have the cash to reinvest now.