Ben Gilbert: preference

Transcript context

…One of the ones that we highlight is the emerging creator who we never seen in a contest before that has really impressed us, because two contests later, those people are the masters of Rec Room tools. They’re teaching classes in Rec Room about how to use these tools and bend them to their will. We’re really on the lookout for that young nascent talent, for sure. We’ve hired, actually. Quite a few people that have worked at Rec Room today were people that were in the community. We’re like, good God, they’re building amazing stuff. I wonder if they would come and give us feedback. The tools that we’re building will help us test them to make sure we’re not breaking them, or explain the way that the tools work to other players, like teaching classes in Rec Room. We keep an eye on it: (1) because it’s valuable for the ecosystem, and (2) it’s a great source of hiring. The only last one that I was thinking about is do you guys think you have switching costs? Apple Podcast has switching costs over David and I. If we were to move and we’re done with podcasting, we’re going to be YouTubers now, we would never do that because we’ve sunked so much into this. Investment wise, it would take us years and years and years to rebuild not only the same audience but frankly understanding for the medium on something that’s not a podcast. Does the same happen to creators in Rec Room? I think so. I think the way that you build in Rec Room is just so unique. It lets a group of people that otherwise can’t create, create. Every other tool like Unity, Unreal, or even Roblox Studio just feels really, really different from Rec Room. I think it’s hard to transfer those skills over. That non-transferability, though, is also the thing that lets all those people who can otherwise create, create, especially once you build up your audience. You have tens of thousands of subscribers in Rec Room and they get notified every time you build a new room as well. There’s a cost to switching to another platform, or you maybe don’t have that audience, or you don’t have that notification engine.…

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