The State of Play: 2024 (Ep. 9)

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.