Oh, I'm coating my cortex, alright, LOL. I was on a mobile. I don't think I made it clear that the middle of 2013 was a bad time to buy. It didn't tank. It just didn't do anything for 5 years. On the other hand, Feb-2017 (right up to April 2018, IIRC) were fantastic times to buy AMD.
NVIDIA is still the leader in the AI/VR race, which isn't just about video games or sports entertainment, it's also the technology that powers self-driving cars, military technology, and all kinds of research, so I'm not sure what their continuing woes are about, because they are going to make a bundle of money. It's just a question of whether or not they're going to run into the same diminishing returns (i.e. deteriorating demand) in the gaming space that Apple has finally realized with the iPhone, and how that will offset their other profits. The game devs tell me ray-tracing and other more advanced graphical rendering techniques are the future, regardless of how trivial they seem now, because there just isn't any real juice left to squeeze out of an increase in polygon rendering, but I'm not convinced there's all that much juice to squeeze out of anything hardware-related, anymore, that is going to set a company apart by getting consumers so excited they shove their hands in their pockets, then pull them out to wave their money begging for it to be taken.
I'm not speculating more concretely than that. I'll leave the buys and sells to market players, but I figured some of you might make be able to digest a more abstract future, and apply it to your investment strategies. The rush to become the cloud-gaming Netflix is already on:
Microsoft CEO says Project xCloud is the ‘Netflix for games’
Which means that companies like this one are going to start getting bought for huge chunks of money like YouTube/Facebook/MySpace/Snapchat/Instagram were in the decade from 2004-2014. I'm sure their execs are building while they wait for one of the megasaurs to come in, sit them in a yacht, and shove them off into the sunset:
https://shadow.tech/usen
Netflix is already experimenting with a leap into interactive services with
Bandersnatch. They have even said they don't see competitors like HBO as competitors. They see
Fortnite as the real competition. Apple has admitted (while trying to not draw attention to it) that the iPhone is nearing the end of its tether for keeping the company at the top of the world, calling "Services" their own future, and there is no "service" more profitable than gaming (equals 3/4 of mobile OS revenues/profits). In fact, Netflix, their most profitable non-gaming app, just pulled up stakes (like many others) for iOS registration to avoid the "Apple tax" on the iOS market (~$286m a year, IIRC).
Fortnite had already done the same despite that it
must be available via the iTunes market for iPhone users to play it since side-loading entails illicit hacking on those phones.
Meanwhile, look at how much Google has invested in "Google News" to compete with Facebook. It's on the same market track as Apple as far as profits with games. Tencent, the owner of
Fortnite, over in China is no different, except that it already is a "gaming" company (a highly diversified one). It's the Steam of China. Now it's trying to figure out how to drink Steam's milkshake outside China, but with an eye to mobile, because they realize the Steam of the world isn't going to be a PC service. It's going to be an Android service. That means ABC/Google is the competition. Android is irrefutably positioned to command the international market a few decades out.
Ad revenue from views coupled with information control from the news. Gambling psychology impulse buying revenue from freemium games.
I just tickles me how all of these companies are evolving towards the same rails from different trainyards.