Gamecraft

In their final episode of Season 2, Mitch and Blake take on the complex and highly speculative topic of the impact of recent improvements in artificial intelligence on the games business. Your hosts acknowledge that the sector is moving so quickly that this episode could be obsolete by the time it airs, and warn that it's difficult at this early moment to look too far into the future.

Mitch offers a loose framework for thinking about AI in game production, mapping this framework to specific areas of game creation and publishing that could be effected by AI. They discuss in particular the disruption that could be caused by massively increased efficiencies in the creative pipeline, the impact on the game labor force, and how the incumbents may be more vulnerable in games than in other software spaces. Mitch tells the story of his first meeting with then-game developer Demis Hassabis (today the CEO of Google DeepMind). Mitch and Blake look at the unpleasant prospect of what behavioral analysis, population clustering, and dynamic ad personalization may mean for the dark arts of paid customer acquisition.

After a look at what AI-enabled game creation might augur for distribution platforms already choked with content, they look at the bull and bear cases for game AI, and its implications for the future of the games business.

Mitch and Blake look at the ins and outs of intellectual property licensing in games. After discussing the checkered history of the practice, they look at the creative and business reasons why licensed IP continues to be valuable to game creators. 

After a quick look at how IP licenses actually function and what to expect from licensors, Mitch and Blake discuss IP arbitrages -- finding gems in the rough that can be licensed at lower cost but with considerable customer acquisition lift, using the examples of Tony Hawk, Kim Kardashian, and Sponge Bob. They draw an important distinction between celebrity endorsement and IP licensing.

The move on to a deep dive on EA Sports, one of the great IP licensing-based businesses ever created in video games. They talk about the EA "house style" of realism based on actual teams and players, and what that meant from an IP acquisition standpoint. Mitch explains their high-priced exclusive licenses with the NFL as well as their complex clockwork licensing regime for the product formerly known as FIFA, which was so resilient it allowed them to cease licensing the master IP itself. They also talk about the sports where EA lost -- like baseball and basketball.

Your hosts turn to the topic of the recently-announced Epic/Disney deal. They present their outsiders' view of Epic's IP partnership strategy, and how Epic has tried to weave media IP, celebrities/influencers, and music licensing into a massive re-engagement scheme of on-going eventfulness for their "forever game" Fortnite. This leads to a discussion of Disney's struggles in gaming and comparisons to the game strategies of their studio competitors Universal and Warner Bros.

They conclude the episode with a look at outbound licensing from game IP -- so-called "transmedia." They look at some early examples, then turn to the recent break-out hits like Super Mario Brothers, Five Nights At Freddy's, The Last of Us, and Arcane. With dozens of new game projects in development in Hollywood after the success of these properties, Mitch and Blake wonder whether outbound licensing will add a new revenue stream for developers who take the risk to develop original IP.

In perhaps their most important episode of the series, Mitch and Blake explain what they mean when they use the term "distribution" and why it is so important to their understanding of how the video games business functions.

Like they did with the term "publishing" last season, they try to recontextualize distribution as a much larger and more important concept than simply moving atoms or bits into commerce. Your hosts define distribution as the myriad of systems that exist in between the developer of a game and the ultimate end-user of that game, all intended to enable access to the game. They explain how every choice of system extracts a cost, how the sum of these costs -- both monetary and non-monetary -- effects enterprise value creation, and how the colloquial notion that "distribution is a commodity" is incredibly naive.

They provide many examples of how this concept actually functions in the real world of the games business, including how packaged goods distribution worked, why customer acquisition is almost always an arbitrage, and what happens when a distribution system breaks.

Mitch and Blake discuss the massive expansion of gaming in emerging markets around the world. The begin with a discussion of the big-picture factors driving this expansion -- primarily mobile technology, but also new business models, payment systems, and demographics. 

They then take a closer look at the Middle East and North Africa, and how the different approaches that companies are taking in Turkey, Israel, and Saudi Arabia are making that region one of the fastest growing in the world. They contrast it with the Latin American market, which has had a longer history but which operates quite differently. 

They turn to Southeast Asia, why it's so interesting as a gaming market, and then discuss the explosive growth of Sea Ltd. They discuss the imporance of Singapore as a trade and banking hub, and how it's attracted investors and operators to the region.

After a quick look at the Sub-Saharan African market, they discuss India, the sleeping giant of gaming markets, and why it has failed to deliver on its promise for the last several decades. Mitch shares some personal anecdotes about doing business in India, and traveling to a remote area that has become the flash point in a geo-political rivalry.

They conclude with a discussion of developments in the Chinese game market since 2020, and consider why the market has stalled. They look at the impacts on economic issues and intervention by the Chinese Communist Party, and the toll that the latter has taken on China's largest domestic publishers and on the perception of the market in the West.

Mitch and Blake explore the idea of independent game development. They attempt to define "indie" in the video game context -- something that proves more difficult that it might seem on the surface. They discuss the early successful indie developers in the 90s, and examine how the technology and business innovations that revolutionized the industry in the 20th century (online distribution, new platforms, new business models) catapulted indie developers into positions of power and influence that rivaled, and even surpassed, their incumbent competitors. They discuss the new publishers like Annapurna who are curating indie games under a brand that functions as an important aspect of the go-to-market for the games they are publishing. They conclude with a look a the modern "incubation" environments where new indie developers are cutting their teeth, such as Roblox and UEFN/Fortnite Creative.

Mitch and Blake expand on last season's discussion of platform-based publishers by introducing a new kind of company: the game-enabling software platform. The five companies they discuss (Epic, Unity, AppLovin, Discord, and Roblox) are all pursuing customer aggregation strategies similar to the platform-based publishers, but -- with the exception of Epic, which has attributes of both a publisher and software platform -- they are doing so with enabling technologies (game engines, advertising tech, and communications software) rather than by producing content. 

Your hosts talk about the evolution of what had previously been considered "tools" businesses into bona fide platforms. They discuss the differences in strategy of these five companies, why they have become so valuable (a combined $80 billion in market value), and how Wall Street has responded to the three that have gone public. They discuss how these companies have established themselves as key players in the marketing and distribution of games, and what that means for the industry.

Mitch and Blake discuss the nuances of game financing. They begin by explaining how the publishing model of advances against royalties functions, and what the expected costs and benefits are for both the developer and publisher.

After a brief discussion of bootstrapping, they do a deep dive on venture capital financing for games. They reveal how venture capital firms make money, drawing a sharp contrast with how traditional game publishers make money. This leads to a conversation about the implied promises that game studios make when they take venture capital. Mitch talks about how ill-prepared he thinks most game companies are to deliver on those promises, and how willing some venture investors have been to fund studios with no obvious competitive business advantages other than their ability to make cool games.

The hosts conclude with a discussion about liquidity. Mitch and Blake provide an overview of the initial public offering market for game companies over the last 20 years, and Mitch shares his experience taking a game company public. Mitch worries that most of the high-profile founders of new game studios are not prepared to be public company CEOs, and how that will affect the venture capital environment for game companies in the future.

They're back!

Season 2 of the GameCraft podcast kicks off with Mitch and Blake introducing the new 8-episode season, followed by an analysis of the current health of the games business.

Mitch and Blake discuss the paradoxical state of the business, where a "golden age" of content is facing some increasing financial headwinds. They compare the games business to the post-pandemic video streaming businesses, which have all faced difficult belt-tightening after a growth phase that produced some of the best content ever.

They look at the implications of increasing consolidation in the business (i.e., Activision/Microsoft, Zynga/TakeTwo, etc.), the end of the ten year surfeit of cheap money (the "Zero Interest Rate Policy"), and, finally, the over-investment of private capital into studios to fund game creation. 

Mitch and Blake take on the complex topic of in-game economies. They discuss how the endemic problems of trust and arbitrage were present in the earliest in-game economies of the late 1980 and how they have persisted to the present web3 economies. They look at the concept of mudlfation, a unique economic problem of massively multiplayer online games, and the strategies for controlling it, as well as the idea of economic play. Mitch talks about how gold farming and real-money trading were early antecedents of play-to-earn, before taking a look at early web3 economies. They end the episode with a discussion of the speculator problem in web3 gaming, and Mitch explains the trust and gifting based economy of Jenova Chen's Sky.

The Story of Habitat

Axie Infinity hack

Raph Koster on "fun" in virtual economies

Under a Killing Moon

"Mudflation"

'Flation (Koster)

Play Money (Dibbell 2007)

Castronova on Everquest GDP

CS:GO Skin Economy Explained

EVE Online (How Money Works)

Is Crypto VC Strategy Securities Fraud?

Sorare

Sky economy

Mitch and Blake discuss the recurring industry obsession with the idea of virtual reality, beginning in the mid-1980s. Mitch recounts a story about his encounter with VPL and the weird world of digital artists and promoters in the early days of personal computing. They look at the second failed wave of VR investment in the 1990s and the importance of Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash. Mitch talks about how Linden Lab's Second Life anticipated many of the ideas of the modern metaverse. They then look at the Oculus, and Facebook's decade-long failure to generate momentum behind a new wave of virtual reality, and what Apple's entry into the market may mean. They conclude with a look at the idea of the metaverse and its challenges.

Links and Show Notes:

Mondo 2000 magazine

Mark Pauline - Survival Research Labs

Neuromancer (William Gibson, 1984)

“Spawn of Atari” (Wired Magazine)

VPL

“Murder She Wrote” VR Episode

Hasbro’s Toaster VR Project

Snow Crash (Neal Stephenson, 1993)

Ready Player One (Ernest Cline, 2011)

Beat Saber

The Metaverse (Matthew Ball, 2022)

Raph Koster’s “real talk about a real metaverse”

Mitch and Blake debate the continuing relevance of dedicated gaming consoles to the video game business. They begin with a discussion of the economics of the console business, and how console manufacturers built defensible moats that have remained relevant for over 40 years. Mitch compares the current state of the console business to the theatrical feature film business -- and how both have become the domain of big budget blockbusters with cultural significance but dwindling market share. They discuss the history of Nintendo, how its often-contrarian business strategy has paid off over time. Mitch explains how a lawsuit with Nintendo got him into the video game business. They conclude with a look at Sony and Microsoft's different responses to cross-platform play, as powerful platform-based publishers like Epic challenge the traditional console model, and what it means to the future of the business.

Links & Show Notes:

Atari

Alex St. John

Xbox GDC Launch Video

Nintendo Playing Cards (1889)

Valve’s Hardware History

“Iwata chooses violence”

Pokemon GO / Niantic

Atari Games v. Nintendo

List of Cross-Platform Games (Q1 2023)

Mitch and Blake propose a framework for understanding user-generated content in games based on two central metaphors -- the playground and the stage -- representing the two ways users "create" content in games through play and performance. They discuss the rise of sandbox games, The Sims, GTA3, Runescape, Second Life, EVE Online, and Minecraft. Mitch explains the evolution of games as performance spaces, beginning with early machinima and progressing to YouTube videos and Twitch streaming. They conclude with a brief look at Roblox and Discord as two "third places" that people hang out online, and the influence of games on the future of social networks.

Links & Show Notes:

Bartle’s Taxonomy

The Sims (WaPo article)

GTA 3 (The Ringer retrospective)

Second Life and lessons for the metaverse

Empires of EVE

Minecraft hits 1 trillion views on YouTube

Machinima

Starcraft on Korean TV (2008)

Ninja and Drake on Twitch

Roblox S-1

Discord

Mitch and Blake discuss how the rise of games-as-services has privileged durable, long-duration play-patterns -- leading to the modern idea of the "Forever Game" which can persist for decades. Mitch outlines his five attributes of long-term engagement and provides examples of each from games like Ultima Online, World of Warcraft, Age of Empires, and League of Legends. They look at the two distinct strands of long-duration play that emerged in the 1990's -- the massively-multiplayer online role playing game and the session-based online competitive game -- and how those genres evolved and cross-polinated to produce multi-billion dollar online games that have remained viable for a decade or more.

Links & Show Notes:

Bill Gurley on LTV

Island of Kesmai

Bran Ferren

I/ITSEC

The Assassination of Lord British

Lineage

AoE2: Red Bull Wololo 2022

World of Warcraft

Fortnite

Mitch and Blake discuss perhaps the most important developments in the video games business since the 1990s: the explosion of casual and mobile gaming. Mitch explains how the casual business was catalyzed by the most unlikely of heroes. He talks about his time as the CEO of the first public mobile game company in the US (JAMDAT) leading up to the launch of the iPhone. They look at the rise of so-called "social gaming" on Facebook and how it was enabled by new advances in analytics and data science. They do a deep dive on the iOS App Store and Mitch talks about how Apple's desire to curate its end-user experience inadvertently led to the rise of Facebook as a customer acquisition gatekeeper. They end with a discussion of why SuperCell succeeded in building a multi-billion dollar mobile game business while Rovio did not.

Links & Show Notes:

Robert Westmoreland 

EA's “We See Farther” Ad 

Ion Storm 

Taneli Armanto / Nokia Snake 

JAMDAT Mobile S-1

Steve Jobs Announces the iPhone 

Mobile Games Dominate User-Acquisition Spending (2021) 

SuperCell 

Mitch and Blake take a deep dive into the game industry’s migration from physical goods at retail to electronic distribution over the internet. They explore the rise of platform-based publishing — a new concept that marries the internet’s remarkable utility in aggregating customers on digital platforms with the traditional publishing roles of editorial, marketing, and sales. This episode covers the origins of the innovative Steam service, Microsoft’s GamePass platform (and why it led to Microsoft's $69B acquisition of Activision-Blizzard), and how the Chinese giant Tencent used platform-based publishing to become the largest game company in the world.

Links & Show Notes:

Is Publishing Dead? | Mitch Lasky (GDC, 2014)

Investing in Content | Mitch Lasky (2012)

Valve Corporation

Steam

Microsoft's Game Pass

Aggregation Theory | Ben Thompson (Stratechery)

A closer look at Tencent, the world’s biggest game company (Polygon)

Hosts Mitch Lasky and Blake Robbins discuss the rise of free-to-play as a dominant business model for video game marketing and distribution. They look at the roots of free-to-play in the shareware business, where companies like id Software and Apogee used it to build independent game businesses. Mitch shares some stories about his time as id's publisher in the late 90's. They then look at free-to-play as a response to rampant PC software piracy, primarily in Asia, and how Korean giant Nexon invented the modern internet free-to-play model with games like Maple Story and particularly Kart Rider. They conclude by tracing free-to-play back to the West, first in the casual games space and later with companies like Riot Games (League of Legends) and Epic (Fortnite). Mitch talks about his early investment in a pre-product Riot, and how they used free-to-play to become one of the most valuable games companies in the world.

Links & Show Notes:

Masters of Doom by David Kushner

Softdisk

Scott Miller (Apogee) [Bonus]

Nexon

Riot Games

In this introductory episode, Mitch and Blake discuss the series as a whole, breaking down the eight episodes and why the themes explored in the episodes are so relevant to understanding the modern business. They discuss their backgrounds in the industry and why they chose to record this series of conversations.