Tag: Doubling

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Business

In a World Let Free, Video Sport Makers Are ‘Doubling Down’

In a World Let Loose, Video Game Makers Are ‘Doubling Down’

At the height of the pandemic, people stuck indoors spent the time playing tons of video games.

Now that countries are slowly opening up again, this behavior will change. And video game makers have warned that when people go outside, their sales will fall and game spending could fall for the first time in at least a decade.

But the companies do not reduce the anticipation. Far from it.

Consider Riot Games, which makes League of Legends. “We’re doubling up,” said Nicolo Laurent, the company’s managing director. “We’re hiring like crazy.”

Then there is Microsoft’s Xbox. “Our gaming investment has never been higher,” said Phil Spencer, who runs the business.

Video game companies are among the pandemic winners saying they continue to plan to move at full steam even after the coronavirus bans that have propelled their businesses over the past 15 months have largely been lifted. Other tech companies that thrived while supplying an out-of-the-way society – including Zoom and Peloton – have also announced they will continue to spend, expand operations and hire new staff.

It’s a counter-intuitive bet. However, some of the companies said they could use the cash they had in store from the gust of wind of the year to return to the growth path they were on before the pandemic accelerated it.

“This is a great time for the industry,” said Strauss Zelnick, general manager of Take-Two Interactive, which makes the NBA 2K and Grand Theft Auto video games. He said the pandemic has made gambling more accessible to a wider audience, and rather than pulling back, “we are investing to grow to meet that demand.”

When industry predicted a slowdown in growth in the past, companies often cut costs, but those downturns and rallies were usually unpredictable due to falling stock markets and recessions, said Bill Pearce, assistant dean at the Haas School of Business from the University of California, Berkeley.

As the pandemic subsides, coronavirus vaccines and predictions of how people will react when the world opens up means companies have “more clarity and more confidence in investing,” Pearce said. Some industries that followed conventional wisdom and slowed down, such as car dealerships, are now kneeling on their knees for failing to meet increasing demand, he said.

However, John Paul Rollert, a professor at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, said that moving forward in the face of changing behavior is a risky and rewarding approach.

“They really play high-stakes poker,” said Mr. Rollert. Still, as the economy recovered and money sloshed around, he added, “You can see why these companies might think, ‘Covid has been good to us, but maybe post-Covid will be great for us.'”

Newzoo, a gaming analytics firm, has forecast that people will spend $ 175.8 billion on games this year, down 1 percent from 2020. This would be the first drop since Newzoo began tracking spending in 2012.

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Updated

May 28, 2021 at 12:54 p.m. ET

Take-Two announced earlier this month that sales will decrease 30 percent year over year for the next quarter and 8 percent for the fiscal year. Activision Blizzard, which makes the war game Call of Duty, forecast an 11 percent year-on-year revenue decline for the next quarter.

“It’s hard to imagine that there will be as much money or game time or as many players as the industry has benefited over the last year, at least in the immediate future,” said Matthew Ball, managing partner at Epyllion Industries, which operates a company Capital fund that invests in gambling.

Other challenges, such as a global chip shortage that is limiting the availability of new video game consoles from Microsoft and Sony, and a lack of blockbuster games after a year of remote work made game development even more difficult than normal.

However, game makers said they were not concerned, especially after such huge pandemic growth.

In January, Microsoft reported quarterly sales of $ 5 billion with games for the first time, partly due to a new generation of Xbox consoles. The company bought ZeniMax Media, which publishes games like Skyrim and Fallout, in September for $ 7.5 billion.

Microsoft’s gaming business is now aiming to expand in countries like Africa by promoting the cloud gaming service xCloud, Spencer said. In cloud gaming, games are hosted in a company’s data center and broadcast to consumers’ devices so they don’t have to install the games or use expensive hardware.

“If you look at the last decade, gaming has seen a double-digit growth pattern,” said Spencer. “The pandemic has undoubtedly accelerated.”

At Take-Two, based in New York, profits rose 46 percent last year. The company has hired around 700 game developers in the past 12 months, expanded its workforce by 10 percent, and invested heavily in technology and marketing, Zelnick said.

“In many ways, it’s an investment year where we’re building for the future,” he said.

Niantic, the San Francisco-based company that produced the mobile game Pokemon Go, expects to increase its workforce by about 25 percent to nearly 900 employees this year, said John Hanke, its managing director. The company was preparing to launch two new games, one based on the Settlers of Catan board game and the other based on the Pikmin franchise. Eight more are in development.

At Riot in Los Angeles, a post-pandemic downturn was “not even an issue for discussion,” Laurent said. Revenue for the privately held company rose 20 percent last year.

(Mr. Laurent has dealt with allegations and complaints from employees that Riot is a sexist workplace. He was sued in January for sexual harassment and retaliation. He has denied the allegations.)

Riot plans to hire 1,000 employees this year, increasing its workforce by 33 percent, Laurent said. In addition to expanding its flagship League of Legends title, Riot is investing in esports leagues for its first-person shooter game Valorant and for Wild Rift, a modified version of League of Legends played on mobile phones. The company is also building two new studios in Shanghai and Seattle this year and plans to open five more locations over the next three years.

“Gambling will be the center of influence,” said Laurent in the 21st century. “The pandemic is just giving us a small boost.”

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Health

U.Okay. coronavirus pressure doubling within the U.S. each 10 days, research finds

U.K. coronavirus strain doubling in the U.S. every 10 days, study finds

The mutant strain of coronavirus, first identified in the UK, remains at low levels in the US, but doubles its range roughly every 10 days, according to a study published by researchers on Sunday.

The study helped model the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which last month had predicted that the more contagious variety could be the dominant strain in the US by March.

The US still has time to take steps to slow the new strain of the virus, the researchers wrote, but they warned that the variant “without” determined and immediate public health action “is likely to have devastating consequences for COVID-19. Mortality and morbidity in the EU will have US in a few months. “

The research, which was partially funded by the CDC and the National Institutes of Health and Canadian Institutes of Health Research, has been published on medRxiv, a preprint server, and has not yet been peer-reviewed.

The new strain of coronavirus, also known as B.1.1.7, spread quickly in the United Kingdom and has become the dominant strain in that country, which by some standards is the hardest hit in Europe.

Health officials have said that existing vaccines are likely to work against new strains, although their effectiveness may be somewhat reduced.

The study found that there are “relatively small” amounts of B.1.1.7. in the US at the moment, but given its rapid spread, it is “almost certainly destined to become the dominant SARS-CoV-2 line by March 2021”.

The new strain accounted for 3.6% of coronavirus cases in the United States in the last week of January, according to the study.

Researchers found that tracking the nationwide spread of the strain is made difficult by the lack of a national genomics surveillance program like in the UK, Denmark and other countries.

They wrote that they had “relatively robust” estimates from California and Florida, but that data outside of those states were limited.

The growth rate of the virus was different in the two states, with B.1.1.7. seems to spread a little more slowly in California. The study’s authors wrote that the strain doubled roughly every 12.2 days in California, 9.1 days in Florida, and 9.8 days nationally.

The study supports the conclusion that the new strain is already spreading via “significant community transmission”.

The authors suggest that the virus was introduced into the country via international travel and spread via domestic travel as millions of Americans crossed the country around Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Years in the fall and winter.

The authors also found that the variant grew a little slower than in European countries. This is another investigation, but it may be due to the sparse current data or other factors – including “competition from other, more transferable” variants.

Other strains of coronavirus of concern have been detected in South Africa and elsewhere.

The researchers warned that their results “reinforce” the need for robust surveillance for possible new and emerging coronavirus variants in the US.

“Since laboratories in the US only sequence a small subset of SARS-CoV-2 samples, the true sequence diversity of SARS-CoV-2 is still unknown in this country,” they wrote.

“The more established oversight programs in other countries have issued important warnings of worrying variants that could affect the US, with B.1.1.7 being just one variant that demonstrates the ability to grow exponentially,” they added.

“Only with consistent, unbiased, large-scale sequencing that encompasses all geographic and demographic populations, including the often underrepresented, along with continued international scientific collaborations and open data sharing, can we accurately assess and track new variants emerging during COVID-19 Pandemic, “the researchers wrote.

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Categories
Business

Pandemic’s Toll on Housing: Falling Behind, Doubling Up

Pandemic’s Toll on Housing: Falling Behind, Doubling Up

As the second year of the pandemic begins, millions of tenants are grappling with lost income and the uncertainty of not knowing how long they will have a home. Their savings are exhausted, they have credit card debt to earn the rent, or they have months overdue payments. Families move in together and settle housing costs by finding others to share them.

The nation has a plague of housing instability that celebrated long before Covid-19, and the economic burden of the pandemic only made it worse. Now the financial scars are deepening and the disruptions to family life are becoming more severe. They leave a legacy that will last long after mass vaccination.

As recently as last year, around 11 million households – one in four US renters – were spending more than half of their pre-tax income on housing, and overcrowding was increasing. It is estimated that there are only 36 affordable rental apartments available for 100 very low-income households.

Now the pandemic is increasing the pressure. A study by the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia found tenants who had lost jobs due to the pandemic had accumulated $ 11 billion in arrears in rent, while a broader measure by Moody’s Analytics, which includes all criminal tenants, estimated that As of January, they owed $ 53 billion in rent back, utilities, and late fees. Other surveys show that families are increasingly pessimistic about earning their rent for the next month and that they will need less groceries and other essentials to pay bills.

On Friday, President Biden underscored the residential real estate uncertainty that millions have faced as monthly employment data provided fresh evidence of a stalled recovery. The rent support in his $ 1.9 trillion relief plan is essential “to keep people in their homes instead of being thrown on the streets.”

The most desperate, wavering over the surface of a missed payment, are already improvising by moving to even more crowded homes, joining friends and relatives, or taking on lodgers.

Such is the case of Angelica Gabriel and Felix Cesario, residents of a two-story apartment complex in Mountain View, California that is largely inhabited by cooks and waitresses as well as maids and workers – the type of workers hardest hit by the pandemic.

Ms. Gabriel, a fast food worker, and her husband, a landscaper, recently moved out of the bedroom they had shared with their two youngest children, 6 and 8. You are now renting the bedroom to a friend of a friend’s while the couple and children sleep on a mattress in the living room. (Two daughters, 14 and 20, continue to share the other bedroom.)

The agreement kept her up to date by raising $ 850 for the monthly rent of $ 2,675.37 Ms. Gabriel handled on the penny.

“We couldn’t pay the rent ourselves,” she said in Spanish. “Suddenly the hours fell. You couldn’t pay, buy food. “

Such changes aren’t directly reflected in rental rates or credit card bills, but various studies show that disturbed and overcrowded households have a number of effects, including poorer long-term health and a decline in educational attainment.

Given the broader economy, the pain is deepest in the US housing market. Surveys of large landowners, whose units tend to be of higher quality and more expensive, have been remarkably resilient to the pandemic. Surveys of small landlords and low-income tenants show that late fees and debts are mounting.

One measure of relief came when Mr Biden extended a federal eviction moratorium, which was due to expire in late January, by two months as states and cities also extended their own eviction moratoriums. In addition, approved rental aid of $ 25 billion is due to be distributed in December.

But for every million households displaced in the United States each year, there are many more millions who move out before missing out on a payment, cut food and medication to make rent, and take up informal housing that does it exists outside of the traditional landlord-tenant relationship.

Updated

Apr 6, 2021, 2:14 p.m. ET

“What happens in the housing court will miss most people in need,” said Davin Reed, an economist with the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia.

While rents have fallen in many major cities, vacancy rates for the cheapest buildings are essentially unchanged from last year, according to CoStar Group, a commercial property group. In other words: Nothing about Covid-19 has changed the fact that there has long been a shortage of affordable housing. So if you lose an affordable home, it will still be difficult to find a new one.

And just as subprime mortgages were a leading indicator of the housing crisis in the mid-2000s, informal tenants – roommates and sub-tenants who don’t have proper leases – are now offering a peek below the surface. These low-income and often undocumented immigrants find these apartments through word of mouth, social media, and Spanish-language news sites where single room apartments (“I rent a room with a bed for $ 400”) are a staple of the classifieds ad.

Kaitlin Heinen, an attorney for the Housing Justice Project in Seattle, said she has seen a significant increase in the number of “unauthorized inmates” in which a landlord tries to evict someone for doing it off the books in recent months has deleted roommate in the device. Claas Ehlers, executive director of Family Promise, a nonprofit homeless prevention organization that has more than 200 subsidiaries in 43 states, said people without a lease account for an overwhelming proportion of the group’s requests for rental assistance and assistance.

“We are seeing this domino effect where cheaper, affordable housing is still saturated, and now we are encountering unauthorized residents,” said Ms. Heinen.

It’s a world of money rent and verbal agreements that are unstable and easy to tear apart – a big reason why various studies show that informal renters are more likely to become homeless.

“People who have places to be evicted are better off than those who don’t,” said Marybeth Shinn, a professor at Vanderbilt University who studies homelessness.

John Wickham found his last spot on Facebook. Mr. Wickham, 60, lives in Decatur, Georgia and worked in customer service for a tree pruning company before losing his job last summer. He collected unemployment insurance but could no longer afford the $ 1,200 a month he was paying to live in a residential hotel. So he resorted to subletting $ 600 with a stranger. His girlfriend found it on Facebook Rentals. Mr Wickham has since defaulted on his share of the rent and is looking for a new place.

“We’re trying to find something on our budget and it doesn’t look easy,” he said.

Renters like Mr. Wickham pose a major challenge to governments trying to prevent evictions and stem the flow of homelessness. Consider what happened last year when a federal deadline approached to spend rental aid that went to states through federal CARES law. Despite the strong demand for help, cities and states struggled to get money to tenants, partly because their criteria were too restrictive.

“Our systems are based on these bourgeois models where everyone has documentation for everything,” said Elizabeth Ananat, economics professor at Barnard College. “Much of the world doesn’t work like that, but most of the people who write laws live in the world that works.”

Cities like Los Angeles and Philadelphia have tried to remedy this by switching to cash assistance programs. California lawyers recently passed a bill extending the state’s eviction moratorium and using up to $ 2.6 billion in federal rent subsidies to pay off rent. Legislation allows tenants to apply for rental assistance by filing documents such as bills and school registrations in lieu of a formal rental agreement, as many other city and state rental assistance programs require.

“The state’s housing crisis wasn’t caused by Covid, and this bill alone certainly won’t solve it,” said Governor Gavin Newsom. “While we need to reaffirm housing affordability, this bill protects in a fair and equitable manner from the worst economic effects of the pandemic.”

In California and elsewhere, aid distribution work is largely reserved for nonprofits. They also filled in the gaps. Take Destination: Home, a San Jose organization that works to end and prevent homelessness. In addition to distributing aid under the CARES Act, the group has raised approximately $ 30 million in private donations that it can make available to a wider segment of the population with less limited spending.

Around 40 percent of the organization’s rental subsidies have been distributed to tenants who do not have a traditional lease, said Jennifer Loving, the executive director.

“People we would never have seen are in trouble now,” she said.

One evening in Mountain View, another non-profit organization, the Reach Potential Movement, distributed bread, cereal, milk and diapers to economically stressed families in the apartment complex where Mrs. Gabriel and Mr. Cesario live.

One of the residents, Hilario Saldívar, a 43-year-old cook and dishwasher, saw his hours cut to four hours a day four days a week and is therefore struggling to afford the $ 2,600 monthly that he pays for the two bedroom apartment he shares with his brother, sister, her husband and child. Mr Saldívar never missed a rental payment, but keeping up to date has come at the expense of his meager savings and even his groceries.

“We’re in a tough battle, a sad battle,” he said in Spanish.

His neighbor Rosa Arellano, a 47-year-old mother of three, cleaned schools and offices before she was laid off last year. She is months behind the $ 1,300 rent for her one bedroom apartment. Ms. Arellano recently signed a document with her landlord stating that California law prohibited her eviction for the time being, but she still owed a balance of $ 3,900, which rose to $ 5,200 with the February rent.

After a year of loss of income, she asked, “Where do we get all the money we owe?”

Liliana Michelena contributed to the coverage.