Ben Gilbert: belief

Transcript context

…Yes, totally true. I think one of the things that this episode has really crystallized for me, though, is that it's wrong to think about gaming as one market because it's not. I think that's right, especially as we're entering the era of people hanging out in videogames. The metaverse is here, it's just in people spending time in a digital environment that isn't necessarily VR, isn't necessarily immersive. It's hanging out on Discord while you're playing games together or whatever. To the extent that video games are where you hang out with your friends, that's a super different use case than me playing Mario Kart to pass the time in my living room, and also a super different use case than someone who wants to basically play a slot machine on their phone while they're on a flight. These are all such different human experiences and jobs to be done, but it is totally crazy to call them all gaming. To your point, I bet if you talk to a Nintendo executive, they look over at mobile and they're like, okay, sure, Apple is making $27 billion a year (Apple and Google) on people playing what you're calling mobile games. But if I look at that, I think only 2 billion of those are games, and the rest of that is something that's not games. It's some statistical extraction of people's money through digital marketing. Yes. I think the reality is even more fine-grained than that. For example, I love the new Halo Infinite. It's had a lot of problems as a live service, but it's finally getting ironed out. Having spent a large portion of my teenage years on Halo, I just love playing it. If you were an alien, or let's say if you were a 60-year-old person observing me playing Halo infinite versus observing somebody else playing Fortnite, on the surface, it looks pretty similar. You're in a live service environment with other people and you are shooting at them. But the job to be done of those two experiences is completely different, and those are very different markets.…

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