YouSaid · the spoken record

Kevin Chou

lines on the record: 28
first: 2019-09-28
most recent: 2019-09-28
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Yeah, no, totally. And I think in the same way that social and mobile and new business models like free-to-play reinforced each other, we're on the cusp of it where we could see kind of cloud, you know, kind of huge back-end scaling, new much more immersive devices like virtual reality, like the Oculus Quest. I think it's a breakthrough device, and then new breakthrough business models that let people truly own their goods and let services be operated by communities. And if you see the three converge in the same way mobile social and cloud did in the last decade, boom, right?”
2019-09-28 · a16z Podcast · New Business Models for Gaming, Collaboration, Creativity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's more organic, right? I mean, if you look at all the great cities, like, you know, they grew organically like that.”
2019-09-28 · a16z Podcast · New Business Models for Gaming, Collaboration, Creativity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One thing that's interesting when you watch Ready Player One is you can take, you know, like there's this orb power orb or whatever it is and you can like take it from one world to another world. And there's some interoperability standards between them so you can build, bring the orb from one place to another, for example, right? But you get what I think is you get something that looks more like New York City instead of Disneyland, right? Which is a much more interesting metaverse”
2019-09-28 · a16z Podcast · New Business Models for Gaming, Collaboration, Creativity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How will that world get built out? Like it could be built out by one company kind of like Facebook could build that whole world, which seems like a really hard thing to do and frankly kind of boring. It's going to be like kind of like Disneyland. Or it could be kind of like the web where each world is like a website and there's like there's like ways to links to travel in between them. And there's an economic model where you can own your own website and you can build it up.”
2019-09-28 · a16z Podcast · New Business Models for Gaming, Collaboration, Creativity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Have games that are in virtual worlds and all sorts of things, you know, and then you combine this going back to earlier talk with VR and the metaverse and sort of Ready Player One style. Like imagine if in, I don't know, I'm a big fan of Ready Player, the movie.”
2019-09-28 · a16z Podcast · New Business Models for Gaming, Collaboration, Creativity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Another aspect, I mean, one of the fascinating things about blockchain is there's so many different lenses you can look at it through another lens you can look at it through is crypto network built on a blockchain as a community owned and operated digital service. So for example, you can imagine, you know, this will require solving some technical problems that aren't solved yet, but over the years having a Twitch or YouTube that's owned by the streamers via tokens, owned and controlled, I should say. They decide on sort of democratically what are the rules, you know, what who gets kicked off, what can you do, and also participate in the upside, right? Instead of it all going to a few centralized companies. And eventually, you know, you can imagine the extreme version of this is the games themselves are DAOs, right? I mean, they're truly owned by the community. And they hire a game development team who, you know, has extra incentives, of course. You're going to still need to do that, right? But you can truly.”
2019-09-28 · a16z Podcast · New Business Models for Gaming, Collaboration, Creativity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The other effect you'll get, I think if you look at most financial markets, you have different types of participants, right? And I think you'll get the same thing here, which is you'll have some people who are just enthusiasts. And they become the first thousand players of a game because they're enthusiasts. But as we see this process happen more, they'll enter people with a financial motive, which I think will be a good thing because they will provide more capital into the system. And the two kind of mutually reinforced. And that's how a lot of things work in, you know, I don't know, the stock market or the art market or other kinds of markets. Commodity markets are great example where a lot of the buyers are users and other buyers are financial buyers, right? And the two kind of play a symbolic role. And I think you can get that here in a way that you couldn't pre-blockchain.”
2019-09-28 · a16z Podcast · New Business Models for Gaming, Collaboration, Creativity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“More risk, exactly. No, and then they become real stakeholders, and they also, by the way, they would also probably behave differently. They probably would have been more loyal, and that would have helped the economics of the business because they were worried about switching costs of the drivers or something. They would have become evangelists. They would have felt like their business owners, right? That's right. I mean, it works. It's one of the great secrets of secrets, but one of the, I think, the real advantages that startups have against kind of non startup companies is that the employees have real ownership. What if you did the same kind of thing with your customers?”
2019-09-28 · a16z Podcast · New Business Models for Gaming, Collaboration, Creativity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of the things I think is unfortunate with the current systems we have, both gaming and non-gaming technology, it's well understood that the way that we, you know, the way startups work, right, is early employees get equity and the earlier you are, the more equity you get, right? And so if the company does really well, the earliest people do better. And then as things go on, and that's in crypto, we call that a bonding curve. And like, what if you had a similar kind of bonding curve for the end users, right? Or the market participants, let's say. So like what if the early Uber drivers got Uber tokens and then they, when Uber IPO, they actually made a lot of money off of it. Now, you know, the person who just joined last week probably shouldn't make a lot of money, but the person who joined seven years ago should.”
2019-09-28 · a16z Podcast · New Business Models for Gaming, Collaboration, Creativity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Really feel like they're participating. And if it's paid in the token, the token, you know, and they go and they help evangelize the game or build new objects for the game or build new Roblox levels or whatever. The 20 cents can become worth much more, right? So they really become true stakeholders in the game.”
2019-09-28 · a16z Podcast · New Business Models for Gaming, Collaboration, Creativity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Way to bring people together. So if you go to some of these subreddits, you'll see that they actually know each other, they help each other with problems. They often, they have meetups, in-person meetups. It's a real community. And it's a very powerful kind of community, right? It really kind of turbocharges the community aspects that the internet had prior to cryptocurrency. And so I think one of the unexpected upsides you might see in this is just a level of passion and commitment. And you get sort of these people that go out and advance, you know, they own the token in the game. They own a bunch of objects. They have big Twitch and Twitter followings. They become even more passionate evangelists. And effectively, from a business point of view, for the publisher, what that does is it dramatically lowers the cost of acquisition.”
2019-09-28 · a16z Podcast · New Business Models for Gaming, Collaboration, Creativity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think another thing that we may see happen with this when you run this experiment is one of the things that's happened in crypto in the last 10 years is that there's been a lot of really large and passionate communities built around various cryptocurrencies. Even I would argue in some cases some which is really the cryptocurrency itself has no really novel features, but the community is very large and passionate if you go on the Reddit or Twitter or whatever you can sort of look at that cynically as like, okay, there's a bunch of overvalued stuff. The sort of positive way, which I like to look at it as is this thing of owning a token and being part of a community is a really”
2019-09-28 · a16z Podcast · New Business Models for Gaming, Collaboration, Creativity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And do you think this could change the distribution of we talked about earlier about how these games are driven by whales, this kind of technology could change that distribution? And so it would be more evenly distributed. I mean, presumably it would also increase the revenue of the game makers. Maybe even also, by the way, and provide an interesting way for the users to generate revenue in a way they couldn't before, and then also potentially kind of smooth out the revenue distribution, right?”
2019-09-28 · a16z Podcast · New Business Models for Gaming, Collaboration, Creativity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, it survived beyond the life of the game developer, all those kinds of benefits, right? Which if you did a centralized system, you know, it would just be like another, just another sort of point system like a lot of games have today.”
2019-09-28 · a16z Podcast · New Business Models for Gaming, Collaboration, Creativity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So they get the You'll have a bunch of exchanges popping up. You'll have games interoperating with each other. And I think another thing is just, as we've seen with Bitcoin, is that if you could argue, why didn't you just start Bitcoin Corp? The answer is no one would actually think it has value. No one would trust it. The centralized creators could break the sacred rules like there's only 21 million Bitcoins. And so people wouldn't value it in the same way. So I think the hope is you'd get a similar kind of effect here where people would feel like the same way they really feel like they own a Bitcoin. They really own this object. They can do what they want with it. They can take it different places. They can use it in different systems. Track the problem, different exchanges, different games.”
2019-09-28 · a16z Podcast · New Business Models for Gaming, Collaboration, Creativity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, there's lots of sort of dark markets where people trade accounts, boosting. There was a famously World of Warcraft had these huge gold farming things. And then some games like Counter-Strike do allow secondary trading. And in those markets, the secondary markets are orders of magnitude larger than the in-game economies.”
2019-09-28 · a16z Podcast · New Business Models for Gaming, Collaboration, Creativity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And what do you say to the cynics who say you could do this without blockchain? You could just have centralized loyalty points.”
2019-09-28 · a16z Podcast · New Business Models for Gaming, Collaboration, Creativity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, can you walk us through an example? Like, in a couple of years, what would the game experience be like using blockchain technology?”
2019-09-28 · a16z Podcast · New Business Models for Gaming, Collaboration, Creativity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because the internet was provided a new business model, whereas mobile did a little bit with payments and things, but companies like Amazon and Facebook and Google did quite well on mobile. It didn't re-rank the ordering of the companies the way that the internet did. So it maps onto the Clay Christensen kind of concept of sustaining versus disruptive innovation. So let's dig in a little bit more to blockchain crypto and how it relates to gaming.”
2019-09-28 · a16z Podcast · New Business Models for Gaming, Collaboration, Creativity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It kind of maps. I think VR kind of maps to me. It's a new device, new form factor maps kind of to mobile. And then the crypto kind of maps to the new business model free to play, right? So in the game industry historically, as new devices, new technology, new delivery mechanisms for sure, like used to go to the arcade and then the store, and then, you know, and then download it Steam. And now streaming. So new delivery mechanism, new devices, and new business models. So sort of three tracks of innovation. And the business model ones, or this is not just true of gaming, but true of all technology, business model innovations tend to create the most startup opportunities. Oh, interesting. So, for example, mobile was far less quote-unquote disruptive to incumbent technology companies than the internet was.”
2019-09-28 · a16z Podcast · New Business Models for Gaming, Collaboration, Creativity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Now, one of the challenges with all of these models like the free-to-play is don't they mostly tend to be whale-based, meaning there's a very small number of users.”
2019-09-28 · a16z Podcast · New Business Models for Gaming, Collaboration, Creativity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You hit your Something, you know, or whatever, or a lot of arcade games, you know, where once you play 10,000 hours, you can win Pac-Man or something. Whereas here, you can keep going and coming up with new strategies.”
2019-09-28 · a16z Podcast · New Business Models for Gaming, Collaboration, Creativity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Become like a major power user. I think if it is, there's a graph, which is how good you are on the y-axis and how much time you spend on the x-axis. It's like it keeps going up as opposed to, I don't know, what, tic-tac-toe, like...”
2019-09-28 · a16z Podcast · New Business Models for Gaming, Collaboration, Creativity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the games where you can't pay to win tend to have more longevity, right? Like the League of Legends. I mean, it's been around now 10 years and still going strong”
2019-09-28 · a16z Podcast · New Business Models for Gaming, Collaboration, Creativity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Paid market So they have a much higher, the pay to win have much higher LTV, so they can support paid marketing. So it's very different acquisition channels as a result.”
2019-09-28 · a16z Podcast · New Business Models for Gaming, Collaboration, Creativity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Whereas Fortnite is, and League of Legends, they're religious about not letting you pay to win. It's a remarkable thing. League of Legends, $2 billion, $3 billion in revenue, and it's literally all cosmetic items. It can't actually help you win, right?”
2019-09-28 · a16z Podcast · New Business Models for Gaming, Collaboration, Creativity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You pay download. And two, they did free to play, but they just like everywhere you go. It's like bye, bye, buy, and it just ruined the experience. It was all these notorious. I think in Star Wars, just have battlefront just had a debacle kind of thing.”
2019-09-28 · a16z Podcast · New Business Models for Gaming, Collaboration, Creativity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Their entry strategy was you go to the carriers who don't have iPhone like in the US it was it was AT&T's singular you go to the other guys who don't have it because they had an exclusive and you say hey don't you want functionality like that and so they basically gave them this free operating system but they let them customize the heck out of it and that was a way to get in there and appeal to the carriers which got them distribution and was a very good strategy but also led to incredible fragmentation so you had to build like essentially custom versions for like whatever”
2019-09-28 · a16z Podcast · New Business Models for Gaming, Collaboration, Creativity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source