The kids are all playing: Roblox, Tencent, Unity surprise

If you’re reading this quickly while waiting for a video game to load, you’re far from alone. Several titans of the gaming world impressed with earnings last week, which sent their stock prices up.

Revenues beat expectations for Roblox, Tencent, and Unity. That comes on top of a beat for Take-Two Interactive in March.

But video game hardware companies are having a harder time. Nintendo, whose fiscal year ended March 31, sold 5 million fewer Switches over the past year than it did in the prior year. Microsoft, which reported at the end of April, saw video game revenues drop 4% year over year, but within that number was a clear divide in different sources of gaming revenue: Xbox’s content and services grew 3%, while hardware revenue dropped 30%.

All of this comes after a gaming revenues slump in 2022, with the end of a pandemic-driven gaming boom.

Who’s seeing more or less of a pickup after that also varied by country. Tencent’s bump comes amid the first video game releases allowed in China since 2021, when regulators in China stopped approving the release of new video games. And Chinese government limitations on when children are allowed to play continue to have a large impact on Tencent’s results, the company said.