The total amount of investment raised by games firms was almost $6bn in 2018.

That's going off a report by Digi-Capital, which says that the total investment figure for last year was $5.7bn. That's more than double the $2bn that was recorded in 2017.

The bulk of this figure - $5bn - was raised before the end of October per a previous report from Digi-Capital.

This was largely helped by the massive $1.25bn investment that Epic Games scored for the year. Second place went to Douyu, with $630m while Shanda Games took the No.3 position with a $474m influx of cash. Fourth and fifth places went to Huya and Voodoo, raising $462m and $200m respectively.

Merger and acquisitions were no slouch either, bringing in more than $22bn. The biggest deals here were Naspers its two per cent stake in Tencent for a cool $10bn, as well as the Chinese games and tech giant buying up five per cent of Ubisoft for $2bn.

Much like 2017, it was the mobile was behind the vast majority of acquisition dollars last year. The MMO and MOBA genres, as well as console and PC, made up the rest of this space, according to Digi-Capital.

Furthermore, the research firm points to the games market being increasingly more consolidated, with the Top Ten publicly-listed publishers being behind 75 per cent of revenue from floated companies.

The firm also points to a huge dip in IPOs, with 2018's figure clocking in at a whopping 90 per cent lower than previously seen. That's not reflective of the UK, where we saw a number of game firms go public during the year.