Video Game Stock Ticker

With many of the games industry's largest companies reporting financial results or updating their official earnings forecasts over the past two months, it's a good time to check in on how the industry's stocks are performing.

We start as ever with the Japanese platform holders (Japanese and US companies are charted separately in these articles since it's hard to compare like-with-like across the ocean, stock prices being inevitably hugely influenced by local economic issues).

Across the Pacific Ocean in Seattle, the other major platform holder is having a bad 2015 so far, with Microsoft by far the worst performer of the three major console companies. That's not really attributable to Xbox, although the console's weak post-holiday performance hasn't exactly done the share price any favors either; rather, it's all down to a big slump in mid-January, when new financial data from the company showed a big drop in revenue from the Windows operating system which gave the markets serious jitters. By contrast, Apple managed to pull another 15 percent in share price growth out of 2015 so far, in spite of now being the world's most valuable company; the contrast with Apple (and with Google, also booming but not included here as it's arguably less relevant as a games platform holder) won't be doing anything to make life easier for Microsoft's top management.

EA's boost in late January came from better than expected earnings, with investors also liking the success of Dragon Age Inquisition and of the firm's mobile gaming line-up. Activision, which has also had a good year so far, didn't see much response to its own positive earnings in early February, but that may be because investors were already aware that it was going to beat targets - it announced that Call of Duty and Skylanders had outperformed expectations in a press release in mid-January, where you can see a quick hop in share price.