David Rosenthal: evaluation

Transcript context

…Sure. We don't talk about it that much on the series, just because I'm avoidant of talking about the console business and whatever. Let me just try and explain why. The console business has been essentially the same business since 1985, really since 1975. It's to sell a box, sell some physical hardware for that box, grudgingly allow it to be played online, and grudgingly allow communication between users. I don't find that interesting from a business model perspective. I'm interested in revolutionary business models, and Gamecraft is really about that. It's about how these revolutionary business models up-ended the industry. Frankly, there haven't been a lot of those in the console business. Now, there have been a lot of interesting developments. You guys explore the story of Nintendo. It's a fascinating story, but it's a human story. Particularly your first episode where you go way back, and you just talk about everybody. Who's everybody else's son-in-law? It's an intensely human story in that regard. I feel like Nintendo, in my mind, did have one revolutionary idea that they have just run with for the past 40 years, which was make incredible games and get people who are capable of making incredible games, either in-house or make sure they publish on the platform. I don't think anybody else realized that at the time. I think that's right. I think Blake put it really well when he was convincing me to do the episode. He said, look, the console, when it entered the market, was a revolutionary business model. Because at the time, the arcade was the dominant way, and it was a quarter drop. In some sense, it was almost like the equivalent of free-to-play because instead of having to pay every time you wanted to touch the controls, now you had the thing in your living room, and you could play whenever you want. If you're talking about the $60 for 60 hours of gameplay, that's literally the equation you were doing at the arcade. You're like, I'm putting 25¢ in for a minute.…

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