With market demand for gaming consoles and notebooks to stay robust for a long while along with the growing popularity of e-sports fueled by increasing international competitions, Taiwan IC designers are upbeat about significant growth in revenues from offering ICs for peripheral gaming devices, according to industry sources.
The sources said Japan's Nintendo Switch has seen raging sales in the games console market, enabling its Taiwan IC supplier, Pixart Imaging, to enjoy booming sales throughout 2017. The company is optimistic about further revenue growth in 2018 as Nintendo will penetrate its Switch console into the China market next year.
MCU chipset suppliers such as Holtek Semiconductor, Ene Technology and Sonix Technology are also aggressively foraying into the gaming peripherals sector, which is expected to reach a market scale of around US$1.5 billion by 2020, the sources said.
Fast response is essential to professional gaming peripheral devices such as mice and keyboards, as it will affect the performance of gamers in professional competitions. And MCU chips play a key role in determining the performance of the devices and are therefore more expensive than general ICs, generating higher gross margins for suppliers.
On another front, supply chain sources said that the gaming market is emerging as a new lucrative niche market for brand vendors of PC systems, motherboards and display cards. For them, the gaming market brings stable sales growth, compared to sharp sales fluctuations seen in the cryptocurrency mining market.
As gaming motherboards and display cards show increasing requirement for high-performance computing, the requirement for heat dissipation is also getting rigid and the resultant demand for ICs for cooling fans will bring Taiwan IC designers new business opportunities, according to industry sources.
E-sports will be a demonstration event in the 2018 Asian Games in Jakarta and an official medal sport in the 2022 Asian Games in Hangzhou, China, painting a bright revenue picture for players in the gaming market, the sources added.
E-sports increasingly popular.
Photo: Shihmin Fu, Digitimes, December 2017
