YouSaid · the spoken record

Matt Ball

lines on the record: 108
first: 2020-08-04
most recent: 2020-08-04
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

“Always love this question because I think when you listen to your podcast, Patrick, you hear such a commonality of the number of people who gave you a break. I certainly benefited from many, many people, Jason Herschel and Abhinav Saksena, Jesse Jacobs. I'm sure I'm going to miss many people, but I think the foundational one ultimately comes back to parents. I think my parents both grew up low income. They worked hard to become middle income and they gave my sister and I an upper middle class if an upper class upbringing of opportunity often at their own disadvantage giving away luxury trips and so forth choosing where we would go to school what we would get the books the time with them and I think extricating that from the success that has come irrespective of hard work opportunities other have given down the line is just impossible and I think that that's a gift that endures”
2020-08-04 · Invest Like the Best · Matt Ball - The Future of Media: Movies, the Metaverse, and More - [Invest Like the Best, EP.185] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“MasterCard are probably not going to be running the payment systems of the metaverse. And if you believe, as Tim does, that you're talking about trillions of dollars of new creation, then you have to ask this question of who's going to run it, who can manage the data, who can manage the entitlements. And so I think those two companies and the way that they work is just remains a gap for me and it's only going to become more important”
2020-08-04 · Invest Like the Best · Matt Ball - The Future of Media: Movies, the Metaverse, and More - [Invest Like the Best, EP.185] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Blockchain and distributed computation actually might be the best application. And then similarly, when you take a look at the idea of moving commerce and creation more online, the idea that you might build actual art of value, you might be conscripted into activities, you might collaborate actually understanding the payment infrastructure and capabilities starts to become very important there. There's this funny Josh Brown quote I saw the other day about Shopify, which is a company I love and of course I'm Canadian and so I'm rooting for them where he joked about the fact that the valuation now implies that Shopify is the global leader in payments on the moon and Mars. And I think that that's funny, but one of the ways to think about that might actually be the Tim Sweeney ethos, which is to say a massive TAM can be unlocked and it's very hard to price. But you can virtually guarantee Amex and”
2020-08-04 · Invest Like the Best · Matt Ball - The Future of Media: Movies, the Metaverse, and More - [Invest Like the Best, EP.185] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would say that there are two things that I really need to get smarter on, and those are payment platforms and blockchain. And to some extent, those are intermingled, but I think both of those are incredibly important as we take a look at more decentralized creation and interoperability of virtual worlds. That's not exclusive to the definition of the metaverse. And that's not exclusive to why I'm interested in it, but certainly when we think of the capabilities required for scaling up mass interaction globally, mass computational sophistication. The complexity of persistence, running an instance that loops, that ends, that resets is much easier than saying, let's do something you and I, Patrick, on a private simulation that exists contiguously with the rest of the world. And when we allow it to connect with the rest of the world, the rest of the world accesses that with full continuity. That is a hard technical problem for which I think”
2020-08-04 · Invest Like the Best · Matt Ball - The Future of Media: Movies, the Metaverse, and More - [Invest Like the Best, EP.185] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Robin Hood, they don't even necessarily own in the case of Hercules a definitive version of Hercules. They had one film in the 90s. And that tells you that there's a real capability there. They have an enormous storytelling skill set that nobody else can do, even though you can understand that Hercules, that Peter Pan have the atomic elements of a good story. That's why others have tried for it. And I think the second point is Disney is not just best at telling stories. They are best at extracting value from those stories. Disney has things that are not in vogue today, which is strong distribution agreements with theaters and large consumer products distribution agreements. And certainly it's theme parks. That means that not only is Disney more effective at building hit content, but they are more effective at monetizing that, more so than any other player. So I think that's where you start to understand this.”
2020-08-04 · Invest Like the Best · Matt Ball - The Future of Media: Movies, the Metaverse, and More - [Invest Like the Best, EP.185] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Most of the classic Eastern European, Eurasian stories that Disney is telling today have been told by competing studios. Others have tried to launch Peter Pan multiple times. There have been two Robin Hoods over the past decade. Both were bombs. A jungle book version came out from Warner Brothers with Andy Serkis, with Christian Bale with Kate Blanchett. It bombed and was sold to Netflix before it even launched in theaters. Jungle Book did 1.5 billion from Disney Warner Bros. did a Hercules movie in 2014 that didn't make money. There was a Tarzan movie. And yet Disney's making a Hercules movie now. Disney's making a Peter Pan movie now. Those have many failed adaptations from competing studios. I think you and I would be hard pressed to say that those aren't going to be hits for Disney. And that tells you there's not actually endemic IP. They don't own.”
2020-08-04 · Invest Like the Best · Matt Ball - The Future of Media: Movies, the Metaverse, and More - [Invest Like the Best, EP.185] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think one of the things that's really interesting there is we certainly can understand the elements of a good story. Joseph Campbell wrote that in the monomyth and the hero of a thousand faces and certainly George Lucas has said that he wrote to that framework though Wachowski is making the matrix wrote to that framework and certainly it's one that JR Tolkien adhered to. We know the elements of good storytelling, good character. It's very, very hard. And yet what I'd say that's fascinating is to put this in perspective, last year there was a lot of conversation around Disney being potentially a monopoly. They had eight of the 10 biggest films of the year. There have been about 36 or 38 films in the past 15 years that crossed a billion Disney has 65% of them, most of which have been in the past three years. And so you can tell if there's clear IP ownership, but the execution is profound.”
2020-08-04 · Invest Like the Best · Matt Ball - The Future of Media: Movies, the Metaverse, and More - [Invest Like the Best, EP.185] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Disney has today, it's going to be doing something fundamentally different, more ambitious, in much the same way that the Marvel Cinematic Universe felt and looked insane.”
2020-08-04 · Invest Like the Best · Matt Ball - The Future of Media: Movies, the Metaverse, and More - [Invest Like the Best, EP.185] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Likeness for his audio. And then you have a performer that is doing motion cap that is remapped to Tony Stark. Adventure to save the world. And that would all be part of this expansive universe. And again, we're at the very nascent elements of that. But the degree to which people are transitioning their want and their love to every category, the degree to which we're already seeing the interplay from the Mandalorian to the films is instructive, and the way to which we're already seeing live experiences in video game that have promotional integrations into films tells us that's coming. And as I mentioned earlier, the Marvel Cinematic Universe became so unprecedented because of a business model innovation. Jurassic Park did so through technology. And I think if you're trying to say, what has the potential to displace these franchises to grow? How does DC or the power rangers surpass the decade and a half of affinity building of Marvel to improve on the monetization of having eight of the 10 biggest films of the year?”
2020-08-04 · Invest Like the Best · Matt Ball - The Future of Media: Movies, the Metaverse, and More - [Invest Like the Best, EP.185] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Pokemon in your living room. I think that we are eventually going to hit into a world in which transmedia storytelling says that there is some cohesive narrative that goes everywhere with you. And in some instances, you can think of that as the metaverse. But the idea that you might come home and log onto a Star Wars game or a Marvel game, and it's a persistent existing universe where you might see your friends go meet up with Tony Stark and go on a mission that has some interaction with the franchise property. That meets the unending consumer want for story. And it's something that's newly technologically possible. When we take a look at some of the investments EPIC and others are making, we're getting into live performance virtual production. It's actually quite possible that you can imagine paying Robert Downey Jr. for his”
2020-08-04 · Invest Like the Best · Matt Ball - The Future of Media: Movies, the Metaverse, and More - [Invest Like the Best, EP.185] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Most important to me has really become this idea of transmedia storytelling. I think we are very early into it. Gavin had spoken about the potency of the witcher, and I addressed some of the performance indicators there. But the witcher is not a transmedia experience. It is cross or multi-category. We are very early into the Marvel Cinematic universe going to television, DC just announced that they're going to start doing that. Of course, Star Wars has been doing it with the Mandalorian, and we're starting to see the major video games move into their own adaptations that are not connected to their games. If you take a look at this history that says our IP gets bigger, it gets more expansive. It involves the audience. It becomes more frequent. It becomes more persistent. If you take a look at the idea of Pokemon Go, which basically says let's actually have your fantasy world everywhere, it's around you.”
2020-08-04 · Invest Like the Best · Matt Ball - The Future of Media: Movies, the Metaverse, and More - [Invest Like the Best, EP.185] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Very challenging, and I think you get into the classic problem where the product actually could fit the market but never finds it. And so I prefer to take the bigger swing on a different thesis.”
2020-08-04 · Invest Like the Best · Matt Ball - The Future of Media: Movies, the Metaverse, and More - [Invest Like the Best, EP.185] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That the upside is enormous, that the short term is very frictionless to creation. But for those same dynamic reasons, it's very hard to bet on a winner pre-release and even early in their career when they have consumer data. And so Series A has become phenomenally expensive. Me personally, I look for big theses around unlocking content formats or user behaviors using new technologies or theses for interaction that are new. I do believe that there are an enormous number of opportunities when you take a look at the incredible talent that's coming out of Activision Blizzard in a riot, the capital available, the project financing, the distribution agreements to get back to Epic Games are such that if you want to create your own studio, it's never been a better time to get the funding to do so. And you can deliver early partnerships to drive distribution, at least for me, I still find”
2020-08-04 · Invest Like the Best · Matt Ball - The Future of Media: Movies, the Metaverse, and More - [Invest Like the Best, EP.185] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would certainly say it is easiest in the sense of the startup capital that is required, the friction of actually releasing your content online and even your share of the proceeds from initial distribution. The problem is, of course, the App Store problem, which is there are more apps than ever before. It doesn't mean that anyone knows you exist, and the cost of installation or awareness that has saturated and escalated so much that you can make something superb and very few people know about it. What that means to me is two things. We see the first in the market. Gaming has become a very hot sector at the startup level. I think in general, there is a lot of timidity and reluctance to provide considerable capital at the precede and seed stage, even to some extent at the Series A stage. But there's an incredible appetite to overpay for metrics at the Series A and Series B level. The market has basically”
2020-08-04 · Invest Like the Best · Matt Ball - The Future of Media: Movies, the Metaverse, and More - [Invest Like the Best, EP.185] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It comes to filmmaking, which has existed for 110 years and has not changed that much. It was actually purely a business model innovation that drove to content.”
2020-08-04 · Invest Like the Best · Matt Ball - The Future of Media: Movies, the Metaverse, and More - [Invest Like the Best, EP.185] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Properties, we see a lot of stagnation. There were many companies that came after HBO, the most recent one launched in 2006, Epix. As I mentioned earlier, there are many people who came after the Marvel Cinematic Universe, none of whom worked. My general thesis is if you are trying to squeeze opportunity here, you can certainly invest around the hope that the content is truly so good that it stands out. But I would argue that the massive learning of the past 50 years is the content matters and we can circumnavigate the idea of whether or not it's distribution or content, but massive innovation on business model or on the technology is what drives that disruptive opportunity. Minecraft, Grand Theft Auto, Fortnite are great examples of that. Newly executed content with either a new business model or technology that fundamentally disrupts that ethos.”
2020-08-04 · Invest Like the Best · Matt Ball - The Future of Media: Movies, the Metaverse, and More - [Invest Like the Best, EP.185] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Totally. I always consider the fact that we take for granted how important technology has been to any new brands coming out in media, classic media, for decades now. And this gets back to the importance of technology in driving the medium. When we think of the biggest brands that were created, Star Wars was phenomenally innovative in practical effects. Then you have Jurassic Park come out in CGI effects. HBO takes advantage of a brand new technology in, I think, 1972 or 1979. That innovation continues all the way through the Marvel Cinematic Universe and the Marvel Cinematic Universe's big innovation was instead of having a sequel every three years sequels being a big business model innovation every six months or one SQL every year. And so with all of these big media”
2020-08-04 · Invest Like the Best · Matt Ball - The Future of Media: Movies, the Metaverse, and More - [Invest Like the Best, EP.185] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Actually, barely innovative. It was mentally very progressive, but all it really did was say, let's use a touchscreen and let's use a wireless connection or a broadband connection. And I think everyone in Hollywood is now trying to think of what's the interactive element that allows us to tap into more enthusiasm that drives a sense of urgency. We've spent the last 15 years basically dumping on the idea of linear broadcast. And I think what that usually comes down to is the idea of there is no reason for us to watch Gray's Anatomy at 9 p.m. Netflix's argument is not only should you not watch it at 9 p.m., you shouldn't have to wait 167 hours to watch the next episode. That's a valid observation.”
2020-08-04 · Invest Like the Best · Matt Ball - The Future of Media: Movies, the Metaverse, and More - [Invest Like the Best, EP.185] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But the last element is what happens when you transform these existing categories. I think one of the big themes that you and I kicked off on was this idea of what would you have built 60 years ago if you had today's technology? And it's easy to forget how much we've inherited from can laughter to 22 minutes for comedy that comes from that. While the company was not successful, could not pivot, could not figure out a sustainable model, I think HQ Trivia remains a really profound example because HQ Trivia basically proved three things, which is if you were going to create the $64,000 question today, it would not be pre-recorded, it would be live. It would not be passive. It would be interactive. It would not focus on the contestant. It would focus on the audience. And we saw how profoundly important that was. And at the same time, HQ Trivio was”
2020-08-04 · Invest Like the Best · Matt Ball - The Future of Media: Movies, the Metaverse, and More - [Invest Like the Best, EP.185] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm in complete agreement there, and I think there are two key points. The first is to understand Hollywood is still a creative product. There is a vision of what a story can be and the effect it can have on the audience. And to some extent, the dispute between Martin Scorsese and Bob Eiger via the Marvel Cinematic Universe was based on the degree of integrity of how important the creative vision is versus the audience want. The difference in gaming is gaming is actually not like the media industry. It has become more of an outcome-driven, it's not based on creative, it's about what you can track and see. And by that I mean optimizing engagement, optimizing monetization, optimizing certain gameplay behaviors. What you want people to be doing as opposed to just how much you do it. And that's a lot more symbolic to a representative consistent with what YouTube or Facebook does rather than what Disney or Warner Media might do.”
2020-08-04 · Invest Like the Best · Matt Ball - The Future of Media: Movies, the Metaverse, and More - [Invest Like the Best, EP.185] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Offload some of that experience into the cloud for the simulation, not for games, but for simulation general purposes of us going to a concert where we don't need to shoot one another, that that's actually the cloud gaming perspective. It's lower intensity, more realistic simulations that aren't about gameplay. It's not about winning. It's not about jumping out of a helicopter, but it's about collective experience. That's where the opportunity is.”
2020-08-04 · Invest Like the Best · Matt Ball - The Future of Media: Movies, the Metaverse, and More - [Invest Like the Best, EP.185] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Physical limits to how long it actually takes to get data. The final thing that I will say is the optimistic element is when you reinvent content categories that are not about let's make a Call of Duty that's remote, let's make a call of duty that you don't need to install. Let's make a Call of Duty with better graphics because you're using a supercomputer. But you say, what are the types of experiences that we can build there? That's when you start to see the really interesting experiences. No one knows what those look like now. There are hypotheses and there's a lot of capital moving towards that. Gavin and I share a portfolio company Genvid that is working on a number of those titles we call miles for massive interactive live events that are based on that premise. But indeed there are many people who think that actually the metaverse of Neil Stevenson and the far out future will never be fully realizable because of physics. But if we start to”
2020-08-04 · Invest Like the Best · Matt Ball - The Future of Media: Movies, the Metaverse, and More - [Invest Like the Best, EP.185] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Call of Duty doesn't actually expand the TAM. There's no billion people who have said, well, for some reason I didn't play Fortnite, but I will now that it's $15 a month just to access a remote piece of hardware. I'm not a general believer in the massive value of that. And some of the major gaming studios will tell you the problem with cloud gaming is you are now fighting against the speed of light. If you actually want to play a first-person shooter with fast Twitch, the actual need to push the entire video, not just through real-time bandwidth, but to servers located 200 miles away, actually does not work. And it's actually not a question of technology or evolution or broadband availability. It's literal physics. There's only so fast you and I, if we're in Europe and Ohio, or even if we're in New York City and Chicago, there are”
2020-08-04 · Invest Like the Best · Matt Ball - The Future of Media: Movies, the Metaverse, and More - [Invest Like the Best, EP.185] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Hardware runtime actually goes up enormously because now you need to rent spot servers that are far away, that are expensive, that are costly to heat, that need to pay for incredibly expensive bandwidth. I think we forget the idea that almost none of the internet truly nine and six nines after percent do not run on real-time bandwidth transmission. Basically, the only thing that needs to be real-time is trading data, and that's why people lay cables under the earth. Not only are the servers expensive, but the delivery costs of cloud gaming are high. And then, of course, unlike all the other innovations, once you've already got free to play, once you can play 400 hours of fortnight every month for free, cloud gaming doesn't make Fortnite cheaper. And because we already have a world in which anyone who wants to play Fortnite can play, just having cloud-based delivery to Fortnite-like games like”
2020-08-04 · Invest Like the Best · Matt Ball - The Future of Media: Movies, the Metaverse, and More - [Invest Like the Best, EP.185] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that's hitting on the device, and that's hitting on the content. Then, of course, we've seen an evolution of business models. It used to be that you would pay per use. That was an arcade game. You want to play Pac-Man, enter a recorder, then it was play per title, that's $60. Then you move to pay for subscription. That's World of Warcraft, $10 a month. Now we're at free to play. So we're now at a point in which the per usage cost of runtime of hardware is at zero. The per unit cost of playtime is at zero. And we're already at a point in which there are 5 billion gamers, broadly defined by mobile customers. Mobile customers, by the way, who can play Fortnite or Minecraft the most popular games in the world can be played on virtually any device. What's unique about cloud gaming is how it's different from those three trends, how it's not like PC, console, or mobile. The cost of hard”
2020-08-04 · Invest Like the Best · Matt Ball - The Future of Media: Movies, the Metaverse, and More - [Invest Like the Best, EP.185] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When we've seen the last several shifts arcade to console, console to PC, PC to mobile, and mobile to live, we've seen three important changes. One is the per title cost of hardware runtime goes down to zero, which is to say you used to have a dedicated arcade that played one game, the cost of running that game was very high per unit of usage. Then you have consoles come out. Consoles unlike arcades are multi-device units. And then over time, actually, consoles start to become multi-purpose units such as people use it to watch Netflix and Xbox.”
2020-08-04 · Invest Like the Best · Matt Ball - The Future of Media: Movies, the Metaverse, and More - [Invest Like the Best, EP.185] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And on top of that, Phil Spencer, the head of Xbox, has said that cloud gaming adoption is years and years and years, verbatim quote, away. And he talked about the fact that streaming video came out in 95, YouTube came out in 2005, Netflix launched in 2007, and it took years after that for Netflix to achieve saturation and then drive the market. And so cloud gaming is likely a ways away. I think there are two core reasons to be skeptical of the short-term future and optimistic about the long-term vision. The first is to understand the distinctiveness of cloud gaming as a platform.”
2020-08-04 · Invest Like the Best · Matt Ball - The Future of Media: Movies, the Metaverse, and More - [Invest Like the Best, EP.185] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Cloud gaming is a really interesting example and certainly based on the moves of Google and to some extent Amazon based on rumors, there's an expectation that this cloud gaming shift is imminent. It will be disruptive. It will give an opportunity for the tech giants to slip into place and become new leaders in distribution. Now Google launched its Stadia solution last year. It has seen very little uptake and two very notable things have happened beyond the consumer side. One is Strauss Zelnik, who's the CEO of Take 2, which owns Rockstar, which made Grand Theft Auto. And by the way, the most recent Grand Theft Auto is believed to be the most successful single media property ever with $7 billion in top line revenue since 2013. And I'm not talking about the franchise. I'm talking about that game. Strauss has come out and said Google overpromised under-delivered and the proposition of cloud gaming is years away.”
2020-08-04 · Invest Like the Best · Matt Ball - The Future of Media: Movies, the Metaverse, and More - [Invest Like the Best, EP.185] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Dollar businesses. This is why Tencent for all of its leadership continues to buy new studios. This is why every one of the major tech companies has started scooping up small studios. And it is why the venture capital community remains bullish on gaming as the biggest players get bigger, but still believe that precede checks in $20 million pre-money valuation companies can be viable”
2020-08-04 · Invest Like the Best · Matt Ball - The Future of Media: Movies, the Metaverse, and More - [Invest Like the Best, EP.185] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There are three wireless carriers. There are five major movie studios. And yet when we take a look at the gaming sector, you have three console platforms, Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo, two PC only game store platform, Steam owned by Valve and Epic. You have two general purpose mobile platforms, iOS and Android that aren't about games but are nevertheless the leading vendors of games. There's 10 Western AAA publishers worth three to 10 billion. There's two engines, Unity Unreal, that have less than a third of the market share. You have social gaming services like Twitch and Snapchat. And this reflects how unique and different the gaming category is, not just in the sense that you don't need to replace existing leaders to grow, but that when you see new platforms emerge, that value allows companies, no matter how late they are to the sector, build multi-billion.”
2020-08-04 · Invest Like the Best · Matt Ball - The Future of Media: Movies, the Metaverse, and More - [Invest Like the Best, EP.185] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Vision Blizzard, but it's notable King isn't launching Activision Blizzard's PC titles for mobile. And of course, when we take a look at live services, no companies have really transitioned into live online persistent worlds as successfully as the new guys have, like Fortnite and Minecraft and so forth. As we look at these new categories to return to Niantic and so forth, there is an expectation that we will have massive growth in market value and brand new platforms emerge and brand new content studios and that I think is unique. And the last thing that I think is so fascinating about that is the way in which you can understand how this explains something unique about the arrangement of the industry today. When you take a look at most consumer media categories, you see enormous concentration of the major players. There are three primary music labels.”
2020-08-04 · Invest Like the Best · Matt Ball - The Future of Media: Movies, the Metaverse, and More - [Invest Like the Best, EP.185] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Niantic being a brilliant example, as that proliferates and grows, we will see net additive growth that does not require cannibalization or substitution from other segments. But there are two other elements that are critical. When we take a look at that history of gaming, the companies that were successful in arcade on a content and hardware basis were not the ones who let in console. We had Atari, Space Invaders, Pac-Man. The console leaders were Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo. They were titles like Metal Gear Solid and Legend of Zelda Super Mario. Those are not the leaders in online PC. That's League of Legends, that's Counter-Strike. Those leaders, the Activision Blizzards of Counter-Strikes, did not lead or grow or meaningfully participate directly in mobile. Those are completely new companies, Supercell, Rovio for a while, King Digital, which was acquired by activists.”
2020-08-04 · Invest Like the Best · Matt Ball - The Future of Media: Movies, the Metaverse, and More - [Invest Like the Best, EP.185] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In growth, we do not have classic disruption. Music, to go back to Spotify, cassettes replaced vinyl, CDs replaced cassettes, download to own, replace CDs, and now streaming is replacing, download to own. That's not what's happening gaming. The arcade industry of the 70s is as big today as it was, even though consoles emerged on top of that. PC and online came after, mobile came after that, and live and online services came after that. And it has operated like geological strata. It has added on top. We have not replaced prior segments. We have unlocked new segments. That has three really interesting implications to investors. The first is you can understand that when we see new formats emerge, that can be in metaverse experiences, that can be AR, VR, MR, XR.”
2020-08-04 · Invest Like the Best · Matt Ball - The Future of Media: Movies, the Metaverse, and More - [Invest Like the Best, EP.185] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Direct marginal costs means you need a counterparty. It means you can customer discriminate. Pricing comes in. That means content can diversify. That means content can customer discriminate on the quality level. And so we see the pay TV ecosystem change. And of course, Netflix disrupts that. Gaming is unique in that”
2020-08-04 · Invest Like the Best · Matt Ball - The Future of Media: Movies, the Metaverse, and More - [Invest Like the Best, EP.185] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The technology usually comes first that informs the business model and that drives content. To use a quick diversion, let's think about television. Broadcast television evolves. You cannot customer discriminate in broadcast. You cannot easily charge for broadcast. You cannot keep Patrick's house from accessing broadcast and Patrick's neighbor from accessing broadcast. The consequence of that is the business model. You go based on advertising. The impact of scarce spectrum is you can't have multiple channels. The consequence of not price discriminating and not having competition is it becomes an eyeballs business. Eyeballs business means you want to maximize the amount of people watching and that leads to content that is low as common denominator or basically what we consider broadcast TV. And so that loop applies over and over. Cable emerges, cable means.”
2020-08-04 · Invest Like the Best · Matt Ball - The Future of Media: Movies, the Metaverse, and More - [Invest Like the Best, EP.185] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The media industry is so interesting because it actually is technology. That's the core idea of media. That's technology we can go as far back to the printing press to understand how media categories are by definition enabled, unlocked, created by technology. A friend of mine, Yoichi Wada, who is the former CEO of Square Enix, has massively influenced my thinking here, and I want to give him credit where he talks about the fact that all media industries are a product of content, business model, and technology.”
2020-08-04 · Invest Like the Best · Matt Ball - The Future of Media: Movies, the Metaverse, and More - [Invest Like the Best, EP.185] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Almost everything that happens virtually. Then they have other assets like Huya, which is the Twitch of China. And so if you actually said who is closest to the metaverse today, the simple answer is not Fortnite or Minecraft. It's actually Tencent. They probably don't have all the tethers in place today. But while not discounting this to the level of a flip of a switch, they actually can do it in a way that is never before possible. And as long as the party is okay with increasing amounts of time online where your relationships are, and obviously there are discounts there, that's enormous. And it's something that the West, if you want just a secular bearish perspective on, no matter how aggressive we were or how deep the technological advantage is or the entrepreneurialism, can't actually match.”
2020-08-04 · Invest Like the Best · Matt Ball - The Future of Media: Movies, the Metaverse, and More - [Invest Like the Best, EP.185] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Around interoperability, about driving standards and experiences, getting parties that prefer having closed ecosystems in smaller TAMs to bigger TAMs where they can't control if they win or lose. Tencent has this weird outcome by nature of their aggression to date, their stakes in every company, the regulatory environment that guarantees they should and will be successful and precludes competition from entering means that they have an enormous share of virtual experiences. Activision Blizzard, as an example, is a public company, but they cannot operate in China. Most of the major publishers can't. Nintendo can't publish its own games. And so Tencent not only has the scale, the technology, the reach, the consumer attention, the social platforms, the commercial, but actually they publish.”
2020-08-04 · Invest Like the Best · Matt Ball - The Future of Media: Movies, the Metaverse, and More - [Invest Like the Best, EP.185] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But also flow more value to the participants is really important. In a weird sense, there's always been that conversation around content versus distribution being king. And of course, both Wax and Wane, Flex, and we can, but what Epic is basically saying is content should be king. And so the implications for investors who have typically said we don't invest in hit-driven businesses, who have historically said, okay, but now I see how games are starting to become platforms or ecosystems, so now we like it. It's got a tech multiple. This is actually going to unlock a lot more value and improve thereons. The last is to think about 10cent. 10cent to me is one of the most astonishing companies. And a number of your other guests recently have spoken about it. And so I don't want to redouble their efforts, but I want to put it in a metaverse perspective. We talk about the earlier impediments to creating the metaverse.”
2020-08-04 · Invest Like the Best · Matt Ball - The Future of Media: Movies, the Metaverse, and More - [Invest Like the Best, EP.185] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I believe remedy used to previously produce and lose the rights to its IP under Epic Games Publishing. They will keep their IP. The consequence of this, and it took investors a few weeks to figure this out, the company's value has doubled. They have not released any news, not what we're making, not what we're planning to make, not the ideas we have. Purely what has happened is you are looking at a content company that has basically changed talent manager if you take a music label analogy. And the consequence of shifting was their EBITDA is probably going to go up several fold. It's still discounted because you don't know what the creative will be. They don't own their own game per the old publishing agreement. But now if they have a comparable success, they will achieve multiple multiples more of the profit. And so when you're talking about investors understanding how over the long term this is going to crank up the TAM, pull forward the future.”
2020-08-04 · Invest Like the Best · Matt Ball - The Future of Media: Movies, the Metaverse, and More - [Invest Like the Best, EP.185] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'll tell you the best example here, which is the actual applied investing related consequence of the TAM approach to value realization. Earlier this year, EPIC announced that one of the first content studios that it would be publishing through Epic Games Publishing, again with those incredibly lucrative terms, was a company called Remedy Entertainment. I believe Remedy is in Sweden. It's a publicly listed company. To some extent, the fact that Epic would say these guys are leaders. We're going to do three deals is suggestive of kingmaking. You're going to get extra distribution. You're going to get a new marker of success. But it also meant that Epic was able to massively improve the economics of this business. Remedy was probably previously paying 80% of revenue to the publisher. Now it's paying 50% to EPIC and only up until the point of recruitment.”
2020-08-04 · Invest Like the Best · Matt Ball - The Future of Media: Movies, the Metaverse, and More - [Invest Like the Best, EP.185] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of the gaming industry to push it to developers or to increase the quality of experience for the audience, but it drives that interoperability. This is Tim trying to bring the metaverse together by driving either margins to creation or commonalities between experience, access, entitlement.”
2020-08-04 · Invest Like the Best · Matt Ball - The Future of Media: Movies, the Metaverse, and More - [Invest Like the Best, EP.185] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Finally, they launched a new division, and this has all happened in the last 18 months called Epic Games Publishing. An epic game publishing basically offers the world's best terms to content owners, the best recoupment, the best IP ownership, the best distribution agreements. It doesn't require them to use Unreal. Again, this is non-privileging your own business. It doesn't obligate them to use epic online services. But this all interconnects in a few different elements. One is obviously it drives R&D to Unreal. It makes it easier to do transmedia, cross-media integrations with Fortnite. It grows the power, potency, and reach of the epic online count system. It helps to drive content to the epic game store. But the core of all of this is not just taking value out of the middle.”
2020-08-04 · Invest Like the Best · Matt Ball - The Future of Media: Movies, the Metaverse, and More - [Invest Like the Best, EP.185] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So that it was the store. This is the classic churn A product into a feature. Fortnite became a launch game in the store as opposed to the thing itself. This meant that within one day, Epic Games Store was launched on tens of millions of devices. And here they take basically 60 to 80% lower commissions than the market leaders in iOS, in PlayStation, in Valve. And again, this is in Tim's perspective of we need to have our commission fees as low as possible, ideally barely above cost, so that developers have more money so that they can produce more content, reinvest in their business. And of course, again, now you're saying we have the underlying engine, we have a multiverse-like experience in Fortnite that can become a platform in Metaverse. We have the underlying live operations infrastructure. Now we've got the distribution arms and epic game store.”
2020-08-04 · Invest Like the Best · Matt Ball - The Future of Media: Movies, the Metaverse, and More - [Invest Like the Best, EP.185] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We will give that to you. You don't need to use Unreal. You don't need to partner with Fortnite. You don't need to partner with the other parts of the business I'll get to in a moment. You can use it. This is something that Microsoft, Amazon, Google have spent hundreds of millions of dollars acquiring companies to do. They charge for it and the market leader Valve, which operates Steam, offers it for free as well, but they require you to integrate your game into the Steam Store. You can't play your game without operating in Steam. And so again, this is epic saying we're going to take everything we built. We're going to give it away for free. Use what you want. Leave what you don't, and we're going to ask nothing else of you. At the same time, Epic used the cash from Fortnite to launch the Epic Game Store. They did something fascinating, which is instead of launching a new store for the sale of content, they updated the Fortnite app.”
2020-08-04 · Invest Like the Best · Matt Ball - The Future of Media: Movies, the Metaverse, and More - [Invest Like the Best, EP.185] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Time, but it's in their network, it's on their platform. Facebook has greater reach in devices and time, but not in simulation. And so Epic built all of this and it's powered by a social graph and what's called the Epic ID. And of course, it's spitting off a lot of cash. And then Epic used all of this to launch what's called Epic Online Services. And the way to think about EOS is basically Fortnite in a box. They go to the rest of the market and they say We will give you all of the technology required to run multiplayer experiences save for spot servers because that ends up being or AWS bills because that becomes unsustainable. But if you want to run matchmaking, if you want to deploy your game on every device, if you want to access the social network, if you want to build leaderboards and player histories, if you want data protection, entitlement management.”
2020-08-04 · Invest Like the Best · Matt Ball - The Future of Media: Movies, the Metaverse, and More - [Invest Like the Best, EP.185] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because unlike Epic, they're not built on game engine. They're built on engine specific for the game. So Fortnite launches, and I think many of the core elements of Fortnite are understood. It's a social space, it's proto-metaverse in the sense that multiple IPs come to intermingle, DCs there, Star Wars there, Marvel's there. You can wear an NFL jersey, you can beat John Wick. We've never really seen that. But what's more important is how Fortnite built a flywheel at Epic. The first is To make Fortnite work, Epic had to build a variety of different technologies to support what is basically the world's largest persistent, most multi-platform, and by multi-platform I mean operating on all sorts of different hardwares with interoperability backend. No one actually has something of equivalent scale today. Microsoft and Sony have more online”
2020-08-04 · Invest Like the Best · Matt Ball - The Future of Media: Movies, the Metaverse, and More - [Invest Like the Best, EP.185] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The battle royale was, to most arguments, copped from a game called PUBG. And I think you can reasonably make the argument that that original premise might have been wrong, but the premise of making games for Epic was for R&D. It was built to be extensible, to be nimble, to be flexible. Epic previously built one of the most successful franchises of the 2000s called Gears of War. They sold it to Microsoft because it was just a game. It helped them fund R&D, but they're not in the Let's Make a Game business. Fortnite was designed to be extensible flexible. And so when they started to have new formats emerge that might be a better fit, they rapidly pivoted because that was the design. To put this in context, Fortnite came out in 2017. It was only in April of this year that Call of Duty, one of the most successful games in the world that is built on shooting and combat, it took them two and a half years or three years to launch a battle royale.”
2020-08-04 · Invest Like the Best · Matt Ball - The Future of Media: Movies, the Metaverse, and More - [Invest Like the Best, EP.185] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's this backup benefit of this, which is the more things that run on these game engines, you start to back into the metaverse interoperability. If Hong Kong's airport was built on Unity and then the local shops start to use Unity for sales, and then you start to build in Unity-based devices or other experiences in that airport when people are going through, you can see how the metaverse starts to emerge. But so Unreal has been operating for decades. It is slowly building in capability, in reach, and it's expanding its skill set. Then, of course, they launch Fortnite. Fortnite's really interesting in that I think a lot of people take this cynical perspective and say, Fortnite launched to mediocre success. It was originally a zombie defense game, what's called player versus environment. So the players would team up together to defend from a zombie invasion. And they quickly pivoted into a battle royale format.”
2020-08-04 · Invest Like the Best · Matt Ball - The Future of Media: Movies, the Metaverse, and More - [Invest Like the Best, EP.185] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“at the point in which that 20-year feedback loop of building out the function, and by the way, the function is diverse. It's not just let's do a shooting game, let's do a platform game, let's do a hangout game. It's all of these things has been developing for 25 years.”
2020-08-04 · Invest Like the Best · Matt Ball - The Future of Media: Movies, the Metaverse, and More - [Invest Like the Best, EP.185] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source