YouSaid · the spoken record

Mitch Lasky

lines on the record: 69
first: 2022-09-06
most recent: 2022-09-06
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

“When I first started working at Activision in 1995, I'd been a lawyer, not a very good one, but I had entered the video game business through that door because I had done some work at the Walt Disney Company when they were making their transition to digital. And so I had learned a lot about that business. I knew very little about business and I knew even less about the video game business when I arrived at the company. And Brian Kelly, who was the chief financial officer at the time, saw a diamond in the rough, I think. And in the first year that I was there went out of his way to sit down with me and just talk to me about the business, in part his philosophy of the business to me. And to this day, I can still hear him sitting on my shoulder whispering in my ear when I think about things in the business. And that was way beyond the call of duty. No pun intended. It would have been really easy for him to have let me sink or swim, but his willingness to invest in me intellectually was probably the”
2022-09-06 · Invest Like the Best · Mitch Lasky - The Business of Gaming - [Invest Like the Best, EP.293] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think we've covered it. This has been the deepest dive I think I've ever done in a conversation with someone. I don't usually go this deep.”
2022-09-06 · Invest Like the Best · Mitch Lasky - The Business of Gaming - [Invest Like the Best, EP.293] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They had assembled before. In my experience as a publisher, having published hundreds of games, these would have all been huge red flags. I went into the meeting thinking, okay, this is a courtesy meeting, and 15 minutes I'm out of here. 15 minutes into the meeting, I was thinking, Jesus Christ, I am going to do this. I'm going to invest in this company. These people are so compelling. They are going to die to make this product. And they know exactly what they're doing and they're able to answer all of my questions and anticipate my questions in ways that I couldn't have even imagined. I was like, bring me Steve Snow, who at the time was their executive producer because I was like, I need to talk to the guy who actually knows how to make a game. I want to spend an hour with Steve and I spend some time with him and he convinced me that these guys had their heads screwed on straight. And I was like, boom. And I greenlit the investment and obviously has gone on to be an extremely important and successful company. I don't know if that answers your question anyway. It's indicative of the way I think about it.”
2022-09-06 · Invest Like the Best · Mitch Lasky - The Business of Gaming - [Invest Like the Best, EP.293] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely, I do because I do think about that as a competitive advantage. A lot of times the better designed products win longer term. I do think that a lot of those things look, feel repetition of action, how fast you can get to the things you really want to find are key. And those things are things that we think about a lot in designing games. Those things are applicable and they are things that I do look for. But again, a lot of those products are much more amenable to a quantitative approach looking at cohorts and retention and activity. To give you an example, when I invested in League of Legends, there were maybe 20 people in the company and they had a wireframe. They had nothing playable. They had no metrics. They had nothing. I went in and Brandon and Mark had a background that wasn't necessarily the kind of background I look for in games founders. Number one, number two, they'd never made a game before. Number three, they'd never made a game with the team.”
2022-09-06 · Invest Like the Best · Mitch Lasky - The Business of Gaming - [Invest Like the Best, EP.293] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Economies and some of these other attributes of games investments, I think, are now more broadly applicable to consumer investing than perhaps they've ever been. I'm not sure that it necessarily gives me any kind of competitive advantage at all in any way, but I do believe that it is curious that game thinking, to put it broadly, is much more applicable across consumer investing than it's ever been.”
2022-09-06 · Invest Like the Best · Mitch Lasky - The Business of Gaming - [Invest Like the Best, EP.293] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I challenge a little bit that I'm actually even a good investor in games, but regardless, this is a tough business, the venture business. When I was coming into it originally, I looked at it from outside and I thought, how hard could it be? The answer is extremely hard. It's not hard, I think, to be like a broken clock occasionally right, but to deliver returns consistently across a decade or more is a really hard thing in the venture business. And I'm still learning how to do it, frankly. I've been doing it for 15 years and I still feel kind of like an amateur. I'm not sure that it has translated. The only thing that I would say in that regard that is interesting is paraphrasing Andreessen's software is eating the world thing. I think games are eating the world in a certain way too. And a lot of online experiences in particular, community experiences, social networking experiences, a lot of consumer internet and mobile are learning things from the kinds of things we've learned in games over the years in the Web3 space in particular.”
2022-09-06 · Invest Like the Best · Mitch Lasky - The Business of Gaming - [Invest Like the Best, EP.293] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Associated with Epic, et cetera, who are spinning out typically people who are on the BizDev side or occasionally on the creative side, I do worry a little bit that some of the next-gen investors that I'm familiar with and that I interact with don't come as much from the creative side or the publishing side of the business, but they do come more from the deal side of the business. I have found at least personally in my own evaluation of games investments, having those creative chops, having been a creative executive and having had to make greenlight decisions over product is incredibly valuable in evaluating the possibilities that are engendered by some of these potential games investments. I would encourage more people from the creative side of the business to think about getting into professional investing because I do think that they would have a bit of a competitive advantage.”
2022-09-06 · Invest Like the Best · Mitch Lasky - The Business of Gaming - [Invest Like the Best, EP.293] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The last generation of me and being Gordon generation of games investors. We were senior executives in the video game business. I mean, I was a section 16 executive in Activision Electronic Arts, had a very successful startup that went public being obviously a legend, the founder of electronic arts, an incredibly important figure. And it took almost that level of credibility to pull this off. Bing and I, being a little older than me, but not that much. I was in my teens when the first video game consoles started appearing. I was already kind of old when the video game business happened. This new generation, you look at someone like Blake, I was publishing Quake 3 Arena when he was born. He's just grown up soaking in this environment. They come to the table with an understanding of gaming that is profound, this next generation of games people. You do see just finishing school, burnishing of their reputation, people who've been associated with riot, people who've been”
2022-09-06 · Invest Like the Best · Mitch Lasky - The Business of Gaming - [Invest Like the Best, EP.293] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“History of genre in terms of success in the business, but as a player, it's a fascinating presentation. And he goes through the slide deck where he really shows the family tree of all the games that you love and what original design patterns spawn them.”
2022-09-06 · Invest Like the Best · Mitch Lasky - The Business of Gaming - [Invest Like the Best, EP.293] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's the hack and slash role playing concept where you have character classes, you have attributes where experience is invested in enhancing character through that, where there's combat, there's inventory, these things that you imagine as being modern RPGs are direct descendants of that play pattern. I don't know if you're familiar with Raf Coster, a genius game designer, one of the original designers of Ultima Online, and a real pioneer in a lot of these concepts that we've been discussing today. He's currently running a company in San Diego that's creating a next-gen MMO that's going to be something I'm very much looking forward to playing when it comes to market. He's got a brilliant presentation that he did at an online conference of the history of genre. And he goes into some of these things in great detail. As a gamer, I'm super interested in this. As a business person, less so. I don't think there's a lot that's flowed from a deep understanding of”
2022-09-06 · Invest Like the Best · Mitch Lasky - The Business of Gaming - [Invest Like the Best, EP.293] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Talked about a little bit earlier the Dicky Mud is probably one of those patterns that has spawned so many games that you've played and loved and never been aware of the fact that they were almost directly influenced and in many cases subtle clones of that play pattern. I think that is probably the most important play pattern in the history of the video game business, I would argue, maybe even more important than the console platformer, which obviously had an incredible life during the heyday of the console. You don't see it as much anymore.”
2022-09-06 · Invest Like the Best · Mitch Lasky - The Business of Gaming - [Invest Like the Best, EP.293] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right now. And I think it's been very successful for them actually internally. And I do think it's extremely innovative bringing that Netflix-like experience with a single monthly subscription enabling all of these products. Now, whether or not the rhythms of the games business, particularly the core games business, in the mobile business, I think it could be a little bit more amenable in the sense that there is a pattern of usage where people download a lot of content and churn through it pretty quickly. I don't know if you've ever watched your kids go and download games on mobile. They'll download 10 things playing for 15 seconds and be like, okay, this sucks. And they move on to the next one. The PC gaming experience a little bit more high investment, high learning curve. It's not quite as eat the next potato chip as watching Netflix where you're constantly moving on to the next thing you're binging. But that said, I found it highly valuable personally. And I really do think it's one of the more interesting new distribution innovations that we've seen.”
2022-09-06 · Invest Like the Best · Mitch Lasky - The Business of Gaming - [Invest Like the Best, EP.293] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Dude, I could go for another hour on the genius of Phil Spencer, one of the smartest and most ambitious and experimental business leaders in the video game business. And I'm kind of in awe of some of the things he's been able to do at a company like Microsoft that it's difficult to make those kinds of innovations when there's a lot of water under the bridge with Xbox and DirectX and Windows and all these other things. But his ability to virtualize the Xbox as a platform rather than as a hardware appliance is one of the underappreciated business moves in the history of the video game business. And I'm a Game Pass subscriber. I love the experience. It's made me download and play games I would never have considered buying before and frankly would not have even considered seeking out independently to download on a free-to-play basis because they are in front of me. The PC version of that Xbox experience comes up for me when I launch it and it offers me this carousel of games that I could potentially play.”
2022-09-06 · Invest Like the Best · Mitch Lasky - The Business of Gaming - [Invest Like the Best, EP.293] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was good, there were a lot of interesting things that coalesced around that moment in time, and that suggested that there's something there. I do feel like there is something there, and particularly post-pandemic, hopefully, at some point we get there where people are able to go back and associate in crowds again, we will see newer, more interesting”
2022-09-06 · Invest Like the Best · Mitch Lasky - The Business of Gaming - [Invest Like the Best, EP.293] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The short answer is no in the short term, a more nuanced answer is that what Neaantic was able to do with Pokemon Go was very interesting in a number of ways that I don't think have been sufficiently studied. Obviously, the pandemic and people's inability to associate in the real world put a real damper on the whole concept of location-based entertainment. But that summer was really cool in a lot of ways when Pokemon Go came out. And I do think it was unique. And obviously, they haven't been able to replicate the success of that initial product people underestimate the power of the first Nintendo intellectual property on consumer mobile. Nintendo's always been extremely proprietary about keeping their intellectual property linked to their own hardware. And this was one of the first times they freed some of their intellectual property to a mass market platform like the iPhone or the Android phones. And that is underestimated in terms of its success. But nevertheless, people were outside. It was summertime.”
2022-09-06 · Invest Like the Best · Mitch Lasky - The Business of Gaming - [Invest Like the Best, EP.293] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The Apple example and seeing how the hardware software integration and platform integration creates the largest company in the history of mankind. And I would be looking at that hungrily as well if I were them. However, I think it is a much bigger problem than people are really thinking.”
2022-09-06 · Invest Like the Best · Mitch Lasky - The Business of Gaming - [Invest Like the Best, EP.293] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I saw Andreessen Porwitz just dumped 50 mil into a cross platform avatar creation company and as seemingly ludicrous as that sounds on the surface that may work I could imagine avatars being the first layer that gets protocolized if you will being able to take currency that you've mined in one game and spend it in another game is going to require a level of trust and it's going to make the international monetary system seem like child's play How are you going to translate those experiences? What is a dollar of Call of Duty money worth in Fortnite? We haven't even really crossed these bridges intellectually, let alone coded them. We've got a lot of work to do before some of these kinds of fantasies are realized. And I think meta's strategy is we're going to make it happen within the context of a walled garden. Now, they obviously have business reasons for pushing it in that direction.”
2022-09-06 · Invest Like the Best · Mitch Lasky - The Business of Gaming - [Invest Like the Best, EP.293] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“World through my haptic glove. But who cares on a certain level? People still read books. It's a very low bandwidth activity, but you can conjure worlds in your mind through something as simple as reading text. I do not believe that we need to get to this end state of fully immersive virtual reality and haptics in order to make these virtual experiences happen. The harder question is, another subset of that question you asked, which is integration. In order to make these things work, we have to agree on protocols, which are going to allow us to interoperate. That is a massively non-trivial problem. Tim Sweeney has tweeted snarkly about it, the CEO of Epic, which is this concept, which I've heard glibly from a bunch of these metaverse proponents where it's like, oh, you're going to buy a gun in Fortnite and you're going to shoot it in Call of Duty. It's like, hell no, you know how hard that is to pull off at the level of code?”
2022-09-06 · Invest Like the Best · Mitch Lasky - The Business of Gaming - [Invest Like the Best, EP.293] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Without being too dismissive, I think it's a bit of a boy's fantasy. I don't think it is an accident that the three major periods of virtual reality investment and innovation coincided with the publishing of three key novels. Neuromancer back in the 80s from William Gibson, Snow Crash from Neil Stevenson, and then Ready Player One. They were almost identical in time to the publications of those books. And so I do believe that this concept of VR haptics immersion, transacting in this three-dimensional metaversal kind of environment, it has attributes of a boy's fantasy to me that bothers me a little bit. And in some sense, I really believe that I already live in the metaverse. I'm talking to you. I'm seeing you. I'm hearing you. We're interacting and we're not present. We're present in a virtual world. Okay, it's not a 3D virtual world. You're not represented as an avatar. I won't feel your touch on my hand if I shake hands with you in the virtual.”
2022-09-06 · Invest Like the Best · Mitch Lasky - The Business of Gaming - [Invest Like the Best, EP.293] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Armadas that can go out into space and deal death, that's a really important role for a quote unquote speculator and something that really integrates them into the community and the play experience in a way where just owning an effing NFT really doesn't. And I think that's the danger is that you create this bifurcation where the people that own the NFTs have a motivation that has nothing to do with the play experience.”
2022-09-06 · Invest Like the Best · Mitch Lasky - The Business of Gaming - [Invest Like the Best, EP.293] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of the places where it's been actually quite interesting comes out of Eve Online, where they created these concentric circles of moderation, where if you were a noob and you were in the main zone and you were preyed upon by a super user or a shark, there was a security mechanism in place that protected you to some extent. But then at the fringes of the game were these places called null space, nullsec. And nullsec had no security. And it was complete free fire zone. You had a built-in metagame or elder game where the more experienced users could migrate out to these spaces and they had a very different play experience and in a lot of ways it was much more of a user generated play experience. They were much more in control of the game. Building a game where there are roles like that, where there is a play role, an important one for the person, let's say in Eve, who runs the corporation that essentially handles the coalition of dozens or hundreds of planets.”
2022-09-06 · Invest Like the Best · Mitch Lasky - The Business of Gaming - [Invest Like the Best, EP.293] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The developer uses to steer things, but by and large, they kind of let it go, man, has it been dynamic? It's unbelievably interesting what has happened in the context of that game over the last decade or so. And I think that that is highly worthy of study. I would really suggest, for example, the online poker boom before they ran into legal trouble and everybody ended up offshore. There was a lot of really interesting insight into how having sharks and minnows and skill and real money.”
2022-09-06 · Invest Like the Best · Mitch Lasky - The Business of Gaming - [Invest Like the Best, EP.293] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I believe that the successful product is going to create a gamification experience. I hate that word, but I'm going to use it anyway. A gamification experience around the speculator such that their sole motivation isn't growth and essentially the Ponzi scheme of bringing more people in at the bottom so that it pushes the top up higher and higher and therefore overrewarding early speculators to the detriment of later speculators. I don't believe that that's been successfully done. Again, I would suggest that there are examples of this happening in other non-Web3 games that I am shocked that Web3 developers are not paying attention to. So for example, Eve Online, famous game, one of the forever games from CCP and Iceland that's been running forever has many of the attributes of a Web3 game. It does have essentially a free economy to a large degree. There's a little bit of an invisible hand.”
2022-09-06 · Invest Like the Best · Mitch Lasky - The Business of Gaming - [Invest Like the Best, EP.293] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the speculator in a coherent and mutually reinforcing way where they do not feel antagonistic. I've seen a lot of bad behavior thus far in the Web3 space with developers essentially using land sales, NFTs, et cetera, as an alternative to venture capital, which is very dangerous in my opinion and has the potential not to end well, although it does super serve that speculator in the three-body problem. It may not be in the best interest of either the developer or the player at the end of the day. We've seen some instability with Axie over time. I was quite interested in how it was working out. I would say I'm long-term optimistic, short-term, pessimistic.”
2022-09-06 · Invest Like the Best · Mitch Lasky - The Business of Gaming - [Invest Like the Best, EP.293] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He describes it as the three body problem, which is that in a classic video game environment, you have the developer and you have the user. It's a stable relationship. It can fluctuate and power can go back and forth between the two of them. But when you introduce the Web3 stuff, you have now a speculator as the third body. And three-body problems are inherently unstable. And I don't think we've understood them at the level of design. Getting back to our earlier conversation about how the best monetization schemes are the most organic and almost invisible in terms of their relationship to the overall design and play experience, we haven't yet seen the Web3 games that have reached that level of success where the Web3 components are at a level of infrastructure and design that makes them almost transparent and invisible to the play experience. Somebody who has solved that three-body problem of integrating the player, the developer,”
2022-09-06 · Invest Like the Best · Mitch Lasky - The Business of Gaming - [Invest Like the Best, EP.293] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, I do, although I am cautious like I was with virtual reality because I do believe that there is a degree of infrastructure that's necessary in order to make it transparent. Because I think in its current form where you're really foregrounding the crypto, you're foregrounding the Web3 stuff. And it's very obviously a key component of the gameplay experience. I don't think those things are going to necessarily scale. I admire a lot as a thinker Blake Robbins, who I think you may also know.”
2022-09-06 · Invest Like the Best · Mitch Lasky - The Business of Gaming - [Invest Like the Best, EP.293] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Massive franchises. The number of views and the recognizability of those people is extraordinary. My son was a FIFA streamer when he was 13, 14 and had an interesting following on YouTube, numbering in the hundreds of thousands to low millions. And we go to a mall and people would be like, oh, hey, you're so like little kids would recognize them. It is a unique and interesting new form of celebrity”
2022-09-06 · Invest Like the Best · Mitch Lasky - The Business of Gaming - [Invest Like the Best, EP.293] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's right. Trying to weld an existing celebrity into gaming, as a lot of people have tried to do, get Snoop to come and play your game on Twitch. They'll bring their audience with them, but that audience will leave when they leave. Those audiences aren't that useful and sticky in that way. I'm not in favor of that, but just look at the games business, the celebrities that it has created. Guys like Mr. Beast or PewDiePie.”
2022-09-06 · Invest Like the Best · Mitch Lasky - The Business of Gaming - [Invest Like the Best, EP.293] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Users ownership of the game, like sense of ownership, feeling that they are invested in the game at a really emotional level, sometimes represented by user-generated content. And that user-generated content can either be inside the game, things like Roblox has obviously a very robust system Minecraft is probably the greatest example of this. On the one hand, but it could also be outside the game. I think of Twitch streaming and linear video creation on YouTube as being user-generated content as part of that same process. Those are really interesting signposts and important ones in terms of the viability of the community longer term. It's openness to new members. Some of the worst communities are where you get these sort of independent grunge music type phenomenon where it's like, oh, no, no, no. I was here first and they try and pull the ladder up behind them around the community. So it really bifurcates into early adopters and then you get a sharks and minnows phenomenon.”
2022-09-06 · Invest Like the Best · Mitch Lasky - The Business of Gaming - [Invest Like the Best, EP.293] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Poker pretty much the same way you play poker today. Fun gameplay patterns are incredibly durable. The nature of consumption in the video game business has perverted our understanding of that. It's made us think that there's got to be massive turnover and innovation constantly. If you strip away the companies and the IP and you really look at the play patterns, things like first-person shooters, adventure games, massively multiplayer online role-playing games, MMOs go back to the Dicku Muds that were invented in Copenhagen back in the early 90s and frankly they haven't changed that much. We're still using that same design pattern to create modern MMO.”
2022-09-06 · Invest Like the Best · Mitch Lasky - The Business of Gaming - [Invest Like the Best, EP.293] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I have five attributes that I look for in these things. I'm not going to share them with you because I'm still an investor in this business and I like to not necessarily open the kimono completely, but I will share some things. So first of all, I think we have a somewhat distorted view of the longevity of games based on the games business. If you look back historically at very successful play patterns, they have incredibly long lifespans. You could have sat down with Leonardo da Vinci and played a credible game of chess. It hasn't changed that much since the 14th century. You'd have to teach him a couple of rules, but basically it's the same game. Backgammon is thousands of years old and is still played pretty much in the same manner that it was played thousands of years ago, even more modern examples, WIST, which we think of today as a contract bridge, is 400 years old. Poker is probably 150 years old. You could have sat down with a frontier cowboy in 1850s, Kansas and played.”
2022-09-06 · Invest Like the Best · Mitch Lasky - The Business of Gaming - [Invest Like the Best, EP.293] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Very broadly across the industry. Some of the more clever developers are actually incorporating Twitch as essentially a platform in their go-to-market.”
2022-09-06 · Invest Like the Best · Mitch Lasky - The Business of Gaming - [Invest Like the Best, EP.293] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Are literally billions of views of Minecraft historically and millions of creators who are putting their stuff up there. And you think about the feedback loop, a kid goes on, watches other people playing the game. It's marketing. It's a level of customer acquisition that you couldn't buy if you tried. It would be prohibitively expensive in that regard. That started it. And then I got to see it up close and personal because Twitch and League of Legends launched contemporaneously. And so you saw a very interesting phenomenon where there were times early in Twitch's history where 50% of the streams were League of Legends. What you saw was this interesting upward spiral where the more people who would stream, the more people would watch it, they'd go download the game and start playing it. They'd start streaming. So it was like a two-company network effect. Twitch benefited from the usage of League of Legends and League of Legends benefited from the usage of Twitch and they reinforced each other. And I think we've started to see that.”
2022-09-06 · Invest Like the Best · Mitch Lasky - The Business of Gaming - [Invest Like the Best, EP.293] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In my opinion, YouTube, in the first instance, and then Twitch later, are the most important non-game drivers of the gaming industry in the world. There's examples outside of the United States, in Korea and in China as well that are analogs. But I'd argue that YouTube in the first instance where people started to upload gameplay and people started to watch it. I remember back early on StarCraft tournaments in Korea were being uploaded in native Korean and people were dubbing them and uploading them to YouTube and geeky friends of mine were watching them like they were watching friends on television and I was like this is the most boring thing. How are you finding this compelling in any way? And today I'm a big age of empires player. I'll watch Age of Empires for tournament games for an hour to see what their meta strategies are. So I've gone down that rabbit hole personally. That kicked things off. Minecraft is essentially a YouTube phenomenon.”
2022-09-06 · Invest Like the Best · Mitch Lasky - The Business of Gaming - [Invest Like the Best, EP.293] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm not long VR in the short term with that $10 billion investment. You see the results of it in its horizon. It's a joke. It's just not compelling as a user experience. They're going to grind. They've obviously made a commitment to this and over time maybe they're going to get it right and maybe the Oculus 3 or the Oculus 4 is going to take off. But I wouldn't be as an investor lining up at the gates, getting ready to buy tickets on this ride.”
2022-09-06 · Invest Like the Best · Mitch Lasky - The Business of Gaming - [Invest Like the Best, EP.293] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You're in your own little environment, you're wearing these hot and heavy glasses on your head, the computational power of them is still pretty primitive. The graphical quality of them is still pretty primitive. I hate to say I was right, but boy was I right. They've dumped $10 billion into this. They just announced a couple months ago they sold what, 14, 15 million units of the Oculus. Some of these games are touting the fact that they have a million monthly active users. It's like, I've got games with a million concurrent users. It's really stillborn in a lot of ways. And again, there have been success stories. Rec room, very interesting product, right? Beat saber, I would argue is probably the mist of virtual reality in the sense that it's selling one-to-one with the active user base. But when they're talking about, oh, there's 120 apps that have made a million dollars. Well, you know what? At a 20 to $30 price point, that's like $30 to $50,000. That's failure.”
2022-09-06 · Invest Like the Best · Mitch Lasky - The Business of Gaming - [Invest Like the Best, EP.293] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was an early VR curmudgeon. I was cautioning the industry famously back at Casual Connect right around the time of what is now Meta then Facebook's purchase of Oculus that it will take a long time for VR to become a mass market phenomenon. I was an early mobile pioneer. I started a mobile games company in 2000. This is seven, eight years before the iPhone and 10 years before broad access to in-app purchase, which was really the catalyst for the mobile games business in a lot of ways. I'm a guy who's gotten out there and taken arrows on the frontier before. I was very cautious because I believe that the experience of VR while visceral and primal in a lot of ways you put on the headset, you're in the Jurassic world or wherever you are, there's something incredibly visceral about that. And I don't discount the power of the experience. But man, there are a lot of drawbacks to it. Like you're shielded from the rest of the world.”
2022-09-06 · Invest Like the Best · Mitch Lasky - The Business of Gaming - [Invest Like the Best, EP.293] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Roblox, tremendous example. But making games is still really hard. More doesn't necessarily mean better in this case. I think it's great. And I think getting these tools into the hands of people who couldn't have, for whatever reason, for reasons of bias and lack of diversity economic opportunity or whatever, getting these tools into the hands of people who love and are passionate about games and can now make them and can realize those visions is a big deal. But it doesn't change the fact that making great games is a unique and difficult skill.”
2022-09-06 · Invest Like the Best · Mitch Lasky - The Business of Gaming - [Invest Like the Best, EP.293] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A lifetime of investment in learning to get there. And I think it's equivalent in the video game business, the existence of unity, the unreal engine, these other technologies which have really democratized access to the industry.”
2022-09-06 · Invest Like the Best · Mitch Lasky - The Business of Gaming - [Invest Like the Best, EP.293] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's interesting to think about akin to what's happened in the linear video world 15, 20 years ago to get a panavision or an RFLX camera on set was hundreds of thousands of dollars in terms of skilled labor and rental cost and lensing and all of these things. Obviously, it became a sport of kings and you and me couldn't go out on a weekend and shoot a low budget feature because we just couldn't get the tech. And to the extent that we could, we had to shoot it on film that had to be processed. And that was really expensive and it had to be cut by hand. That was the old days. Now Soderberg shot a movie on an iPhone and put it into full commercial distribution with a thousand dollar device in your pocket and some very minor additions you can really make something like that work. Now, does that mean that everybody can make a feature film? Absolutely not. Making a feature film is hard. It's a skill. It requires in some cases”
2022-09-06 · Invest Like the Best · Mitch Lasky - The Business of Gaming - [Invest Like the Best, EP.293] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To aggregate and to push demand toward the mobile skew, which is where they're going to do the principal monetization. So I think it's a very exciting experiment in terms of a next generation approach to this problem.”
2022-09-06 · Invest Like the Best · Mitch Lasky - The Business of Gaming - [Invest Like the Best, EP.293] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This kind of paid advertising, ones without a single product hit, they've been tremendously affected as installs go down, you're obviously going to then see a knock-on effect where revenues are going to go down. And to the extent that these companies have been running their models based on certain spending translating into certain lifetime value, those models are going to have to be rewritten very fundamentally in order to account for this new reality. And I think we're going to see some really interesting new go-to-market approaches that aren't going to be as dependent on paid acquisition, which I think is fantastically good for the industry in the long run. I just invested in a business up in Canada of really interesting new games company, and they are taking a go-to-market approach for a game that's going to primarily monetize on mobile where they're going to use the PCU as a very interesting customer acquisition vehicle because it'll be available to Twitch streamers and other influencers who can use it.”
2022-09-06 · Invest Like the Best · Mitch Lasky - The Business of Gaming - [Invest Like the Best, EP.293] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's really highlighted how reliant a lot of the mobile game business was on Facebook advertising and other forms of direct response advertising. The fact that you can't target whales and you can't target potential installers as well as you could when data was leaking everywhere off of these platforms. And again, I'm not averse to what Apple is doing here. There are potentially monopolistic issues with the way that they're doing it and to the extent that they then step into the place of Facebook later with an advertising platform and replicate a lot of this stuff within their own walled garden. I'm not sure that's a great outcome for the market, but I'll keep those opinions to myself. We've seen in companies that I've been following and that I'm aware of where I have some privileged access to data, installs are down between 10% on the good side and 35% on the bad side from some of these companies that are typically more in the aggregation business because those are the ones more reliant typically on.”
2022-09-06 · Invest Like the Best · Mitch Lasky - The Business of Gaming - [Invest Like the Best, EP.293] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Expected revenues on advertising and promotion, that was a lot in the shiny disc era. I've had companies come in and pitch me that are on $100 million revenue run rate with a casino game. They're spending $92 million on customer acquisition. Crazy shit. We would never have done. And those are dangerous models because, as Bill Gurley has argued, he has a great post in above the crowd about the dangers of that customer acquisition, customer lifetime value model. When that stuff starts to fall over, it falls over really fast and really dramatically. I find those patterns to be very dangerous. That's why I've always gravitated towards products that have a much more organic distribution opportunity, getting back to Genoa and Sky, that game company, they spend a tiny fraction of revenue on paid customer acquisition. And almost all of it is being driven by community and word of mouth. Again, it's really...”
2022-09-06 · Invest Like the Best · Mitch Lasky - The Business of Gaming - [Invest Like the Best, EP.293] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Units. Very interesting early signal of where Mobile was headed. Mobile has really reinforced the move to free to play because obviously when 2,000 games are being launched in the App Store every month, it's impossible to get somebody to pay for anything up front. It's sort of a race to the bottom in that regard. It's accelerated the move to free-to-play tremendously. It's created a lot of interesting innovations around monetization strategies in conjunction with free-to-play. It's been a real laboratory for experimentation. On the negative side, it's brought out the worst in customer acquisition dark patterns, pushing people, pushing installs, incentivized to install some of the bullshit that we saw around social gaming back in the Zynga playfish days mid-2000s, not my cup of tea. You've also seen a level of acquisition spending that by historical standards would seem anomalous. Back in the day, if we were spending 25% of”
2022-09-06 · Invest Like the Best · Mitch Lasky - The Business of Gaming - [Invest Like the Best, EP.293] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just to lay the groundwork, current business, probably $180, $190 billion worldwide. It's about 50 to 55% mobile in terms of revenue, which is very surprising to most people who've come from the historical games business, like when they actually drill into the numbers if they're not aware of it, mobile is the dominant paradigm in gaming right now. Console and PC split the remaining half of the games business roughly. PC's about 20% console is about 25% of the remaining revenue. What is the influence of mobile? It's enormous. In good ways and in bad ways, I have a long history in this business. I was making mobile games before the app store, before iOS, when we were working on feature phones. Interestingly, a lot of successful people in the business, Ilca at Supercell and a number of others, came out of that world. Nokia, Motorola, we were making a bowling game on Motorola phones that did millions and millions of”
2022-09-06 · Invest Like the Best · Mitch Lasky - The Business of Gaming - [Invest Like the Best, EP.293] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think it's more art than science in the sense that the most successful strategies tend to be the ones that are the most integrated with the design of the game, that adhere the most closely to the ethos of the game. I don't have any privileged knowledge here, but in my experience, it's a design first informed by the quant rather than a quant first design second.”
2022-09-06 · Invest Like the Best · Mitch Lasky - The Business of Gaming - [Invest Like the Best, EP.293] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“10 hours worth of credit. This was very important because you still had to grind. So there wasn't a play to win component to this and play to win is something that can massively disrupt the community around the video game and something that gamers hate. So the 10 hour grinder could say, look, the lawyer who's going to come in and grind for two hours but pay for the 10-hour grind, you know what? They're still grinding for two hours. So there's a degree of fairness to this. And those products were extremely popular early on with the community. We could foreground those a little bit more. I have a portfolio company in Los Angeles called Back Game Company run by Genova Chen. The company is just crushing it. They have been over the last year at times the number four product by revenue in China, which is no small thing. This is a company doing hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue and nine digit EBITDA. And it took us a year to figure out how to monetize it properly.”
2022-09-06 · Invest Like the Best · Mitch Lasky - The Business of Gaming - [Invest Like the Best, EP.293] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You're absolutely right. And in my experience, it has led me to build in a period of monetization experimentation in that first year after launch. And my expectations for some of these games is when they come out, they'll be relatively flat for the first six, nine, 12 months while the team is really digging into what is working, the monetization hooks that are in the game, which ones are succeeding and which ones are not. So for example, in the League of Legends context, an early surprising thing that was heavily monetizing were these potions that allowed for multiplying your grind. So for example, if you were trying to gain experience points, you could go in if you played for 10 hours, you'd get 10 experience points for those 10 hours. But there are people who have jobs, who have lives, who have families, who can't go in and grind for 10 hours. And so we would sell them a potion where if they would buy the potion and apply it, if they went in and did the grind for two hours, they could.”
2022-09-06 · Invest Like the Best · Mitch Lasky - The Business of Gaming - [Invest Like the Best, EP.293] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was really radical. There was a very strong sense at the time that, okay, yeah, it's going to work in casual, but it's never going to work in the core. The core is just going to abhor the concept of not getting everything and not paying up front, et cetera. And of course, they were completely wrong. And League of Legends went on to generate a billion dollars a year in revenue for a decade, one of the most successful video games, if not the most successful video game in history.”
2022-09-06 · Invest Like the Best · Mitch Lasky - The Business of Gaming - [Invest Like the Best, EP.293] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source